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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
You're watching TVPN. Today is Thursday, 02/19/2026. We are live from TVPN Ultra. The temple of technology, the fortunes of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ram.com.
Speaker 1:Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 2:To practice that. Handshake tutorial.
Speaker 1:In case you were wondering how to shake hands with your, with your friend or with your enemy, it works. It's the same. It's the same process. You grab the hand with great force.
Speaker 2:Yes. And And lift up.
Speaker 1:Underrated while you're while you can establish dominance. You can handshake clearly.
Speaker 2:Huge missed opportunity for Sam and Dario not
Speaker 1:To crush each other's hands to the point where the other one is bleeding and crying. That would have really set the tone.
Speaker 2:They have to rely on voice transcription.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly. It would have been much better to just watch crushing in the hand. You know, you do those, like, strength training for a reason.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:Every once in while, you don't wanna get caught lacking. Anyway, there's big news today. We're canceling the SaaS pocalypse.
Speaker 2:It's over.
Speaker 1:RIP SaaS pocalypse. It it occurred from January 2026 to February 2026, and it's over now. We're declaring it over. No. It's not it's not entirely over.
Speaker 1:Who knows where where the market will go?
Speaker 2:In many ways, it's just getting started.
Speaker 1:In many ways, it's getting started. But I do think we're starting to see, a bifurcation in the sloppable companies and the unsloppable companies. There should be some divergence between companies that have figured out how to integrate with AI, how to retool their business model, or just show that their business model was strong all along. Yeah. And we'll go through that.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah. There's there's a category of SaaS Yes. That is SaaS Yes. But they will be Fine. AI beneficiaries.
Speaker 1:Yep. Totally. Totally. Should we should we watch have you seen Pacific Rim? No.
Speaker 1:We gotta watch this pump up speech.
Speaker 2:Let's do it. Because this
Speaker 1:gets me fired up. We're canceling the apocalypse. It's movie night again in class. This is from Pacific Rim. We're going to a minute twenty two in here.
Speaker 1:Jump ahead because this is one of the greatest speeches
Speaker 2:don't wanna watch it? You don't wanna Okay.
Speaker 1:We watch full thing. It's raining. We'll watch We'll watch the the full full thing. Thing. It's my favorite movie.
Speaker 1:This is honestly my favorite movie. I might watch it in Apple Vision Pro this weekend. Who knows? It's such a great film. And did you know the director of this film won an Academy Award?
Speaker 1:That's right. This is an Academy Award winning director at work. Who's the director? Guillermo Guillermo del He won for Shape of Water. He did not win for Pacific Rim, but he should have because this film is fantastic.
Speaker 1:So the storyline. Aliens, giant alien Godzilla like creatures called Kaijus have descended upon Earth. No. And only robots that are as big as the Godzillas can fight back. But you need two people.
Speaker 1:It's much like us. You need two pilots because the mental load of driving the robot being in the drift is too intense for a single person. It will drive you crazy. So two pilots, two Jaeger pilots must pilot the ship together.
Speaker 2:Very
Speaker 1:cool. And share the load. Very cool. And and so they both punch and then the robot punches. It's amazing.
Speaker 1:It's it's a great film. Everyone. He's got a good speech. You you you're you're known for giving great speeches just like this. This is this is a Jordy Hayes original right here.
Speaker 1:Yes. Movie day. Again, welcome to the stream, Ryan. Today. At the edge of our hope.
Speaker 1:At the edge of our hope. Things aren't watching The end time. Of AI is upon We've chosen not only to believe in ourselves, but in each other. We must believe in the stocks of the SaaS companies. There's not a man nor woman in here that shall stand alone.
Speaker 1:No. No public company shareholder will stand alone. We stand with We face the monsters that are at our door and bring the fight to them. We're bringing the fight to the foundation labs. We are cancelling the apocalypse.
Speaker 1:We're cancelling the apocalypse. We're cancelling the sasspocalypse. And then the greatest soundtrack ever. I love
Speaker 2:I only I only really had to ever give one speech like that Yeah. Last year.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But it hit.
Speaker 1:It hit.
Speaker 2:The team needed it. And that
Speaker 1:We did. And we got through.
Speaker 2:Critical moment. Powered through.
Speaker 1:Through. So anyway, we've lost a lot of good soldiers, lot of good market cap out there during the SaaS pocalypse. $2,000,000,000,000, something like that maybe. It's been rough. And and I mean, truthfully, like, the narrative does make sense.
Speaker 1:Like, agentic AI systems, copilots, foundation models, like, these are disruptive innovations. Fundamentally, they're counter positioned against traditional seat based SaaS pros pricing. We know this. Legacy companies will be caught in a jam because pivoting the entire business model is difficult. You can't just flip a switch and start charging customers in a completely different way.
Speaker 1:Your investors will freak out because your finances will be deeply unprofitable all of a sudden in the public market.
Speaker 2:Very different.
Speaker 1:Board is very different. Like, it'll take time to build back up. And also, like, company cultures and organizational structures are aligned around particular incentives, and so you have to rewire everything for a different business model. And that's really hard. And that's why people are sounding the this is a disruptive innovation.
Speaker 1:This is not a sustaining innovation like mobile or cloud. The the the AI version of, you know, x y or z SaaS company will not be like the mobile version of that SaaS company.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That that's Yeah.
Speaker 2:And even even the even the the safer bets like the system of record Yep. There's this concern around, okay, well, can an agent just kind of replatform you? Like, it it does that, if you can onboard to a new system faster, decrease the lock in? But Yeah. Continue.
Speaker 1:So, the SaaSpocalypse was always a little bit of an indiscriminate hammer. It felt like, I mean, there was one article in the journal that was like Anthropic launched a legal tool and that caused the sell off. And it's like, well, could be that or it also could be called code or it could be OpenClaw or Codex or Spark or, like, there's a million different things going on in the AI world. That one just kind of took hold. But, it became this, like, indiscriminate hammer that just kinda hit every company.
Speaker 1:And during, earning season, every CEO had to talk about AI and the threat of AI. But I think we will soon be finding out what companies are truly unsloppable as you put it and actually benefit in the AI future. And there's a bunch of early signals, so let's run through them. First, Google's comeback. I mean, this was the first victim of the apocalypse.
Speaker 1:This one happened, like, a year or two ago. Why would anyone search Google ever if an LLM could get you a better answer and fewer clicks? Of course, Google quickly caught up to the frontier. They launched AI overviews. They flex deep DeepMinds research previews.
Speaker 1:They showed off the power of the TPU. Core business is surviving and thriving due due in part to Gemini helping understand intent so they can deliver ads on longer, more complex searches. So Google's been doing fine. They're they're sort of already building back from the SaaS apocalypse that they experienced. Then you have Meta.
Speaker 1:Will mute will user minutes migrate over to LLMs? Will Sora destroy Instagram overnight? Will Slop clog the feeds? Maybe, but not before Meta's transformer based gem model absolutely destroys ad targeting and just makes everything so much better and reaccelerates revenue. And we've talked to a lot of folks about that.
Speaker 1:And so Meta is doing very well Even though they haven't, like, figured out their AI strategy, rolled out any of the new crazy frontier models from MSL, like, the business is great because there's because they're,
Speaker 2:you know Yeah. I think they have the
Speaker 1:They're unsolved.
Speaker 2:Certainly argue they have an AI strategy Totally. Is use AIML to to make, really good ads. And they've doing
Speaker 1:it for a decade.
Speaker 2:But you're it's more on the product side. Right? Yeah. So is it is it the Manus? Is it net new products?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Is it is it Meta AI? Yep.
Speaker 1:And so there's there it gets more interesting when you go to the smaller companies, not super small, but, Spotify. Spotify doesn't really need to invest in generative AI. I heard a good analogy that was like, did did did should should, Spotify have, like, released a guitar so that people can make more music? Like, no. Because people will pick whatever tool is available, and then they will release that music on Spotify, and then the algorithm will sort it.
Speaker 1:And so, the like, you know, these artists, if they're using AI tools or maybe they're just prompters, whatever you wanna call them, they will bring AI music to the platform. It'll be filtered by algorithms. Slop will be in the trough, but only the most delicious slop will bubble to the top of the trough. So it's good to be in the trough business as long as you have an algorithm that sorts the trough, the slop from the more sloppy slop. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Well said.
Speaker 1:Current data shows AI music currently underperforms dramatically on a percentage basis. Like, the number of AI songs is huge, but the number of, like, actual minutes watched and and is is low. Even if that flips, Spotify still benefits. Let's switch over to Shopify. You can definitely vibe code an ecommerce website now, but Shopify is not a major cost driver for most businesses that use it.
Speaker 1:You're you're talking maybe like a thousand dollars a month for some companies, and it's a lot of headache that they just don't have to even think about. And then there's a whole bunch of advantages that Shopify should benefit from in the AI era. It's very full featured, so it's actually hard to replace. Setting up a new store is faster than waiting for a prompt to return. Like, it's all prebuilt, and it's just, like, create a new copy in the database of Shopify when you set up new a new store.
Speaker 1:And then AI tools benefit from all the context and data that Shopify has across the entire platform. And then lastly, agented commerce doesn't replace Shopify checkout. Yeah. It's just a front end to the to the checkout. Much more Checkout.
Speaker 2:Payment. Exactly. Post purchase.
Speaker 1:So if it's driving activity, that's actually a net benefit. And so there's a whole bunch more examples. Roblox is another interesting example. I heard a crazy stat. 67% of global non China spending growth in the gaming industry last year went to Roblox.
Speaker 1:Like, gaming had a bad year. Roblox had a fantastic year, and I think the stock's down, like, 50%. And so, you know, yes, you can vibe code a video game, but the Roblox network and ecosystem is already at scale, and it's absolutely dominating, and they're monetizing a ton. And their monetization on a per minute basis is, I think, like, five times lower than other platforms, like, if you comp it to TikTok or Instagram. And so whether it's ads or more in game currencies or something like, the willingness to pay should go up.
Speaker 1:Now there's still a question about, you know, do folks age out of Roblox? How long can they keep these customers on? Will they get older folks to to rejoin Roblox at some point or join Roblox for the first time at some point? But certainly, you know, not probably a beneficiary of AI vibe coding and being able to build more stuff. And, again, filtering the the different apps that are built so that grow a garden or steal a brain rot can be power law outcomes within that ecosystem.
Speaker 1:That's the value of filtering and being an aggregator. Lastly, you got to consider Salesforce. Marc Benioff has been duking it out with Jim Kramer on CNBC over CPAPE's pricing in an AI era for over a year now, and it's 100% true that there are some amazing AI native CRM startups that are aggressively trying to eat off Benioff's plate. But Anthropic is hiring a Salesforce admin. We we put up a card for this because we really enjoyed this.
Speaker 1:But, where where where where where was it? Did we put this? Yes. Unemployed vibe coder. Bro, SaaS is dead.
Speaker 1:You can bill a CRM in minutes. No modern company is gonna buy software ever again. Repost, and I'll send you my PDF that killed Salesforce. And then Anthropic is has a job listing for Salesforce admin because they're growing so fast and so big that they, that they need someone just to be full time job, manage their internal Salesforce project. That's so big.
Speaker 1:So Iconic opportunity. Is this revealed preference? Is there something else going on here? Are they is this person gonna be reinforcement learning data for them? Who knows?
Speaker 1:But at least for right now, they're gonna be paying Salesforce, and time will tell. And then lastly, you know, the SaaS apocalypse, it might arrive in full at some point, but and we'll start to see real revenue declines, which I think would be, like, the real signal of major disruption. But, Figma just announced 70% growth in weekly active users, 40% year over year revenue growth. We have Dylan Field coming on the show in in just a little bit. He'll be on at 01:30 today.
Speaker 1:And so, there's growth all over the SaaS ecosystem, and things don't seem to be decelerating or d or or slowing down. It's definitely go time, though, and it's time to revisit sources of strength.
Speaker 2:It's wartime.
Speaker 1:It's time to become unsloppable. It is wartime. It's founder mode time. And at least you need to explain why you were never sloppable in the first place. And that's what Harley, at Shopify did a really good job of on the earnings call.
Speaker 1:He got so many questions. He had to back up and just re explain. You know, people got in the weeds on the AI checkout thing, and he had to re explain, like, no. Yeah. Like, agentic checkout happens on top of the on top of the Shopify checkout.
Speaker 1:The economics are exactly the same. They're exactly the same. So Yep. Like, I don't worry, basically.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So going back to the fax machine example Mhmm. In 1999 was the first year that showed a significant drop in the sale of physical fax machines. They dropped by 10% in a single year.
Speaker 1:When was that? In 1999. 1999.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And so that's a that is not a okay growth just started slowing. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It had been slowing up until that point. But it
Speaker 1:And then
Speaker 2:it went was slowing and then it like fell off a cliff.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yeah. That makes sense. Quickly, let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform.
Speaker 1:And let's also pull up the linear lineup and tell you who's coming on the show. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on Linear are using agents.
Speaker 2:We have Sigil coming on to talk about Web Web four point o. Four point o, a new AI agent project that he's working on where AI can deploy, transact, pay its own bills, run micro economies without humans in the loop. Then of course, we have Sagar and Jetty from Breaking Points Always coming always a fun conversation. And then Dylan Field coming on to talk about their earnings and everything that they're doing with Claude, Chet, GBT, Gemini, and all of those folks. And then we have Peter from Code Metal announcing his series b.
Speaker 2:Eric from Freeform, another series b. And then Lubisa from Thales announcing a $169,000,000 raise building model specific AI chips. So banger lineup today and can't wait to get to those folks.
Speaker 1:Should we read through this goodwill hunting meme? This sums up the SaaS pocalypse pretty well, and I love this meme template from malinvestment.jpeg. Of course, that's your contention. You're a first time SaaS bear. You You just got finished listening to some podcast Dario onto our cash probably.
Speaker 1:Now you think it's the end of white collar work and seat based pricing is screwed. You're gonna you're gonna be convinced of that till tomorrow when you get to something big is happening. Then you'll install Claude Bot on a Mac mini vibe coded dashboard on top of a Postgres database and say we're all just a couple Ralph loops away from building a Salesforce competitor. That's going to last until next week when you discover context graphs and then you're gonna be talking about how the systems of record will be disintermediated by an agentic layer and reposting OAI marketing graphics. Well, as a matter of fact, I won't because ultimately the application layer is just the application layer is just business logic on top of a CRUD database.
Speaker 1:You got that from Satya's appearance on the b g two pod, December 2024. Right? Yeah. I saw that too. Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us?
Speaker 1:Do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter? Or is that your thing? You get into the replies of anyone posting a SaaS sticker, you watch some podcasts, then pawn it off as your own idea to impress some VCs and embarrass some nonce who's long SaaS. See see the sad thing about a guy like you is in a couple of years, you're going to start doing some thinking on your own and you're gonna come up with the fact that there are two certainties in there are two certainties in life. One, don't do that.
Speaker 1:And two, you drop $30 on Mac minis and LLM API calls to come up with the same conclusions you could have got for free by following a handful of VC accounts.
Speaker 2:It's great. Roasted.
Speaker 1:I love that meme. It's fantastic. Anyway, there's another there's another post in here to close out the SaaS pocalypse. Buck says, there's a there's a long history of dominant platforms vertically integrating and consuming the entire economy. That is why the largest companies in the world today are railroads, utilities, steam engine manufacturers and CPU producers.
Speaker 1:Love it. Great. Very good. Let me tell you about Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full text search, build from first principles on object storage, fast, 10 x cheaper and extremely scalable.
Speaker 2:Bland hit the timeline yesterday. They're they unveiled Soldier AI Mhmm. The first rapper to
Speaker 1:People rasping.
Speaker 2:Their voice with AI.
Speaker 1:Let's watch this video.
Speaker 2:Soldier Boy or use his voice yourself. I wanna see With sound of course.
Speaker 1:I wanna see what Soulja Boy Voice.
Speaker 3:I was the first rapper on YouTube. The first rapper with his own star. The first rapper with the iPhone. And now I'm the first rapper to automate his voice with AI.
Speaker 4:Bland baby. People
Speaker 2:I thought this was a a fun concept. Yeah. But many people did not. It it didn't it didn't really it didn't really resonate. It definitely got attention.
Speaker 2:I bet they I bet they drove a bunch of business from this.
Speaker 1:1,000,000 views, six Yeah. 100
Speaker 2:Usually, on a million views, you wanna be getting somewhere around 30,000.
Speaker 1:No. A couple thousand likes.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's something that people love and gen genuinely resonates will get upwards of twenty twenty thousand or more. Yeah. Anyways, I I I think it's cool. I'm I'm surprised we haven't seen more of this kind of thing, celebrities coming in. I think Solja Yeah.
Speaker 2:Obviously is not at the peak of his career, so it makes sense for him to dip his toes in here. And I bet this was surprisingly affordable, for Bland. Hopefully hopefully, they got some some some business out of it.
Speaker 1:So yeah. It's interesting. Eleven Labs has Michael Caine, Bert Reynolds, Richard Feynman, Sir Laurence Olivier, doctor Maya Angelou, James Dean, Judy Garland, Albert Einstein. Then there's some AI voices you can just do like Will, Jessica, Eric, Bella, and there's community voices as well. I wonder if they should do more, more promotion around Michael Caine.
Speaker 1:Like, that's clearly a licensing deal, but I haven't like Yeah. The reason this breaks through is because there's a video of Soldier Boy. It's a real video, and it's funny and he's like That's good. On camera.
Speaker 2:Right? The entire premise is you can have Soulja Boy answer your business phone calls which is like pretty which is Pretty differentiated. Which is extremely differentiated. Yeah. And if you're let's say you're you're a kind of business.
Speaker 2:Let's say you have a smoothie shop. Yeah. Like adding this will certainly get people talking about
Speaker 1:Probably delightful.
Speaker 2:I called I called the acai bowl place and Soulja Boy picked up. Yeah. Like this will this will I'm not I'm not I'm not gonna I'm not gonna pile on. I I think it's fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I think that also just as a top of funnel activation, like, you hear about this, you go and you're you're like, okay. Realistically, my business doesn't need soldier boy, but my business does need, like, just a normal voice.
Speaker 2:Anyway I didn't miss the opportunity to say, like, I'm the first AI rapper. With no w
Speaker 1:Yeah. Plan plan works.
Speaker 2:Which they didn't do from what I'm seeing.
Speaker 1:Well, if you want intelligent real time conversational agents, head over to 11, reimagine human technology interaction with 11.
Speaker 2:Ice T, according to Justin Moore, is an AI accelerationist. This is great. He is hitting the timeline. Somebody said, I wish more older rappers realized that AI shouldn't touch the music industry in the way that impacts creative work, including music videos. When I say AI AI, some people group in STEM separation.
Speaker 2:Or restoration in that into that, and that's not what I'm talking about. Anyways
Speaker 1:So basically stem separation is when you have a full song and you wanna and you wanna separate like the guitar from the drums from the bass, like the stems. Got it. Got it. Got it. Stems because you're you're a guitarist.
Speaker 1:Right? Isn't that the word? Guitar player.
Speaker 2:But Icee says, I disagree. Fans want us to make and produce some music then shoot an expensive video, then they get it for free. If they have an Apple subscription or Spotify, pay us 0.007¢ a
Speaker 1:stream. Double $0.07.
Speaker 2:The days of expensive videos are over. There isn't even MTV. AI is the only sensible way to add visuals to a song. You can hate it all you want. It's the future.
Speaker 1:It's the future. Is Ice T still gonna is he dropping music videos recently? Like, has he actually is he just predicting this? Or is he is he living this and actually putting out AI videos? It it it it certainly does make sense to just bring down the cost of music video production.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's what a lot of CGI did. A lot of a lot of music videos are just the artist on a green screen with cool graphics in the background. And that's often enough. Or I mean, they there used to be the age of, like, the expensive music video. Wasn't it Thriller?
Speaker 1:It was like multiple millions of dollars, and you cannot spend that much anymore. No way. And so a lot of a lot of music videos have come down in cost, done more in CGI. It feels like AI will get there, but you have to be the right artist and you have to message it correctly because there's gonna be crazy backlashing.
Speaker 2:Matthew McConaughey hit Variety this morning.
Speaker 1:What did say?
Speaker 2:And commenting on AI. Brandon just shared it. Mhmm. He said, it's coming. It's already here.
Speaker 2:Don't deny it. It's not gonna be enough to sit on the sidelines and make the moral plea that no, this is wrong. It's not gonna last. There's too much money to be made and it's too productive.
Speaker 1:AI acceleration.
Speaker 2:So I say own yourself, voice, likeness, etcetera, trade market, whatever you gotta do so when it comes, no one can steal you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense. The Matthew McConaughey voice, I mean, that's an iconic voice. I think there's definitely a huge deal to be done.
Speaker 1:And the AI voices, although we're in a boom right now, I remember being able to go on Waze and pick I think Snoop Dogg had a deal, but there were a number of celebrities that had you can imagine, like, an Arnold Schwarzenegger, get to the choppa, but then also, like, take a left, and it's, like, fun. And they would just prerecord all of the different lines, like, keep going straight, bare left, take a hard left, and you record, like, 20 different lines, and then the program just picks the audio file for the correct moment because there's only, like, 20 different things you could possibly say in a navigation app. And so a whole bunch of celebrities did deals, least temporarily. I don't know how many of them are still around. But those types of things, like, there's a there's clearly a framework for that.
Speaker 1:And all the agencies and all the unions understand this. So I feel like we're we're in this weird, like, bizarro world where people think that, like, oh, like, IP does law doesn't exist and we aren't gonna be able to deal with this. It's like, no. Like, there's there's like decades of lawyers who, Yeah. Are foaming at the mouth being like, I can't wait to sue ByteDance.
Speaker 1:This is gonna be awesome.
Speaker 2:Thing is that it's gonna require real cooperation from
Speaker 1:Platforms. Platforms. The platforms are ready to cooperate.
Speaker 2:I disagree. I don't think I don't think they're cooperating that hard. There's so much there's so much content of a bunch of individuals Yeah. On YouTube, on Meta, that is using their name and likeness and putting them in situations that they would never ever ever agree to. And you can argue that it's not good for their brand.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. But it's incredibly entertaining. Mhmm. And so the platforms leave the content up. And yes, you can do takedown requests and things like that.
Speaker 2:Yep. But by the time you do a takedown request, it's got 200,000 likes or You don't need
Speaker 1:to do a takedown request. You just need to do pay pay me. Pay me. That's what people want. They wanna be paid.
Speaker 1:That like, I I think I think the the message in that Matthew McConaughey post is not is not like, it's it's super critical that no one ever uses an image of me or or my voice ever. It's that, look, if somebody's profiting off it, that's that's my IP. That's my
Speaker 2:I mean, I I read his comment more around making movies. Mhmm. Or saying, don't use AI to make this scene that would normally take
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Four weeks Yeah. In some exotic location Mhmm. And a thousand people. Mhmm. AI is gonna be used for that.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. I think there's a separate issue of people generating Matthew McConaughey Mhmm. Doing and saying things that he would never Sure. Agree to that are sort of compromising Mhmm. Or again, putting him in situations or having him say things that he wouldn't ever agree to, even if he was getting paid.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I just think like the the answer is like more AI. Like, you look at the Sora like the Sora Cameo functionality. Yeah. And like, it was it was pretty easy for me to say like, always depict me as a bodybuilder.
Speaker 1:And as silly as that is, like, it worked. Like like, when we did that collab post with the OpenAI team, they were like, we don't know how to get around this. And we're like, you should be able to go in and and and change this, but they didn't because, like, it is actually enforced at, a pretty low level.
Speaker 2:Alex Yeah. From Outtake we've had on the show Yeah. He does this for a bunch Outtake does this for a bunch of different Interesting. Celebrities Okay. Where you basically sign up for Outtake.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And they're constantly monitoring the entire sure.net for sure. Filing takedown requests on your behalf. And so I think, again, I think it'll end up, I think, the platforms will do something, but it will also be somewhat of a tax.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer, crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Let's actually watch the full video of the AI Impact Summit in India. Narendra Modi is
Speaker 2:there. Insane lineup.
Speaker 1:Insane lineup. They pulled everyone. They got Sundar there. They got Alex Wang there. They got Dario.
Speaker 1:They got Sam. Then here we go. And they're zooming out. And what do we see? Two fists raised in opposition.
Speaker 1:Iconic.
Speaker 2:Throwing up the axe. Throwing up the axe. Someone someone on axe was, was saying that
Speaker 1:Peter's gonna say this is AI.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That it was, a little shout out to Elon saying, you're not here, but you're you're here with us.
Speaker 1:If you scroll down, someone used AI to show them hugging, which is very nice.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like we said, missed missed opportunity for one of them
Speaker 1:For a handshake mog?
Speaker 2:To do, yeah, a handshake mog. No doubt. They'll be back next year.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:I think this is an annual thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And it seems like a banger lineup. I wonder if there'll be talks that will come out of this. Any more comments or just was it off the record or will there just be reporting out of this or maybe it was just talking points. There was no real like news dropped.
Speaker 1:But with when you could get those folks together, it should feel like Davos. There should be interesting sort of new positions that are coming out.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The the Mistral founder was apparently speaking there
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And the room was like almost empty.
Speaker 1:Wait, really?
Speaker 2:And so No. And yes, somebody was saying like, hey, this guy is Is literally actually Yeah. Like crushing it Yeah. In Europe. Show some respect.
Speaker 2:Put some respect.
Speaker 1:Sit down, take notes.
Speaker 2:Study.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sit down and study it. Don't just listen. Don't just listen. Let me tell you about Labelbox.
Speaker 1:Reinforcement learning environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams.
Speaker 2:JC Foster
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Says What happened? Three months ago, quit my job to chase a dream to build an affordable, convenient, plastic free coffee maker. Grateful for everyone who has reserved companies for Pure Steel. Pure Steel.
Speaker 1:This is a correct ratio. 7,000,000 views, 34,000 likes. This is what you were getting at.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So
Speaker 1:Huge. What is up with the laptop?
Speaker 2:So I guess he was at SpaceX.
Speaker 1:Very long.
Speaker 2:He was at SpaceX.
Speaker 1:Okay. He was nice.
Speaker 2:And one of the when I immediately saw Hold on.
Speaker 1:Can we talk about this laptop? Look at what is going on? Zoom in on this laptop.
Speaker 2:Wait. I think this is he took the it's like an optical illusion of it. Right? It's using the the fish eye lens. Oh.
Speaker 2:Okay. Because this if you fold if if based on this angle, if you folded the screen The screen
Speaker 1:would just cover the keyboard. Like, the trackpad would just be hanging out, like a like an untucked t shirt under a sweater. Makes no sense. Sorry, Jordy. I got distracted by the extremely long, long laptop.
Speaker 1:Tell me more about the Pure Steel Company of America.
Speaker 2:The Pure Steel Company of America. So, yeah. So anyway, started going viral. Yeah. Very, very cool product.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. If you've tried to make coffee without having plastic be a part of the process Yeah. It's incredibly hard and you're pouring hot liquid over plastic. Sure. Some of that plastic will disintegrate
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:End up end up in your cup of joe. Yep. So the product makes a lot of sense. One of the issues is it this post, went extremely, viral. Yes.
Speaker 2:And somebody said somebody posted this thing's only $80. Go reserve this right now. And so that post started going really viral. Yes. The challenge
Speaker 1:This thing is $80 and made of American glass and steel. Go reserve one right now. And so got 18,000.
Speaker 2:And so this is of course not going to cost $80. Okay. There's literally no chance.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:But I think people were thinking, hey, can buy this for $80. It seems like the steal of a lifetime. I think something like this, once you actually build it, will probably need to cost somewhere like 600, $700, something in that range. So really rough. The other thing is pull up pull up the pull up the website.
Speaker 2:I want I want I think this guy may have knocked off the Aurora website. I'm just realizing this in real time. So Aurora is of course the
Speaker 1:Oh, does kind of look similar.
Speaker 2:It's kinda rounded. Pure steel. Look at the look at the header. Look at the header system with which Emmett Schein
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Designed for us. And even look at the imagery. Their their imagery is AI.
Speaker 5:Okay.
Speaker 2:And now pull up the the Aurora website.
Speaker 1:Oh, it has the same rounded corners. Yeah. It is very similar.
Speaker 2:I think he got a little inspired.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So if you see the the header and everything of the the way the buttons work, go go scroll down even more. If you go down to some of the more lifestyle imagery, like, they it's the same, like, style, you know Yeah. The kitchen, the photography. Yeah. A little close.
Speaker 1:It's a little close.
Speaker 2:But he's bootstrapped. He's got a bunch of sales now. I'm sure he'll figure out. I'm sure he'll figure out. Okay.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, the the SpaceX like, lore here is that they should be able to deliver this at $80. Like, says transparent pricing. It's time to know what you're paying for. Traditional coffee makers cost $200. Pure steel is the same amount of materials, but less markup.
Speaker 1:And so they want to deliver this to you, I think, for $80. We'll be very interesting to see how they do it, where they change prices. If they change prices, they might be able to deliver. I don't know. Maybe it'll be VC subsidies.
Speaker 1:Maybe it's $80 a month, and you have to pay for some subscription
Speaker 2:You own nothing. Turn it off.
Speaker 6:Have seat based pricing.
Speaker 1:Seat based pricing. Yes. How many cups a jug you make?
Speaker 2:How many coffee drinkers are
Speaker 1:Yeah. You Well, no. It should be in the age of AI, should be consumption based. So you should pay per coffee cup.
Speaker 6:How many tokens each cup?
Speaker 1:Yes. No. But I I I don't know. This doesn't seem impossible to get stamped steel and and and assemble it and have it I mean, it's a pretty basic device. Right?
Speaker 1:It just needs to warm up a pot of coffee. Like, it needs to boil water. That's not that's not crazy to me that that could be $80. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Now, I mean, I know through Aurora Yeah. Like dealing with these materials. Yep. Depends. Like looking at some of this design here, the way it's all bolted together
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's like Seems pretty basic.
Speaker 2:Even the even the the labor cost of doing something like this, I think The robots.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We'll see.
Speaker 1:Amazon does have an all steel coffee maker. They have some results for all coffee makers in the $60 range. They got a Black and Decker here. It looks like it's covered in plastic, but, you know, it's at least advertised as stainless steel. There's some stainless steel options on here, but, yeah, a lot of them are are in the in the several $100 range.
Speaker 1:So I don't know. We'll have to keep we'll have to keep keep an eye on it. The the the
Speaker 2:I'm excited about this. I would happily I would happily
Speaker 1:Looks great.
Speaker 2:Buy one of these.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It looks great. And, I mean, a lot of a lot of these companies will underprice the first run. So they'll say, yeah. Okay.
Speaker 1:We're we're just gonna take a loss on the first thousand units that we ship, and then we will raise prices over time. And then when we go into retail, we'll raise prices more. And, you know, there will just be a process for that. If you go with this viral, if you have a lot of a lot of demand, you might be able to raise money to offset that, your suppliers or your you know, you might just make no margin for a long time. There's there's a way this gets built for $80.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And he was at SpaceX for two years.
Speaker 1:SpaceX is is a good good organization. We talked to
Speaker 2:a SpaceX. Except that the issue is he was a finance analyst at SpaceX. So he might need to poach some of the engineers.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, yeah. Analyzing the finances of SpaceX being like, wow, they make rocket.
Speaker 2:Wow. We could be eat we could be making plastic free coffee. Just do it. Think from
Speaker 1:first principles. I don't know. Let's see. Van man says, the response to this insanely simple yet non plastic coffee maker should usher in the era of dumb simple appliances that work and don't poison you or connect to your WiFi. I think that there there is huge demand for this.
Speaker 1:People want simpler devices. Did I tell you about
Speaker 2:my My coffee machine connects to my WiFi. I'm like, it it all actually, I don't think I did, but it always wants.
Speaker 1:It it always actually does. Yeah. It's not a joke. Wow. Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's like it's a lot of it's a lot of steel.
Speaker 1:Pour over, so no. But I'm like, you
Speaker 2:don't need you don't need access to the network, bro. Just focus. Just put put the beans Yeah. In the just put the put the coffee in the cup.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I have another story, but first, me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent. Secure any agent.
Speaker 1:So I had a little tiny bit of IoT in my house just to turn off and turn on the
Speaker 2:That's my dishwasher emails me.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Peak performance. I had a I have a tiny bit of IoT just for lights that are hard to reach, lamps that are plugged into basically a wall socket that has a little box that connects to the WiFi. There's an app turns on that turns off the light. I think the company just went out of business because the the server just doesn't work and the app doesn't load anymore.
Speaker 1:And so you just all of the stuff that I bought is just worthless. And I just need to like
Speaker 2:It's smart though.
Speaker 1:Rip it out. It's extremely dumb, in fact. Very very silly. And I was Rad is
Speaker 2:dropping alpha. He says recommend the Otoni fabir fabirca
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:For plastic free electric kettles. That's smart. Then he says they should put ads on the pure steel coffee maker to keep it around.
Speaker 1:See? See, think outside of the box. I'm I'm calling it $80 shipped. That's what it's gonna cost. No.
Speaker 1:There'll probably a shipping fee on top of it. Shipping to Alaska. That is dangerous territory.
Speaker 2:Don't talk about it.
Speaker 1:Not give free shipping nationwide because Alaska is technically part of the nation, and you will be paying $50 to get stuff up there. It is not it is not an Amazon Prime necessarily, for for your for your default upstart ecommerce business. So, so I got completely cooked by my by my Wi Fi light system. And I was thinking like, okay, certainly I can vibe code this. Definitely not.
Speaker 1:Definitely just going back to switches. Definitely going back to the stone age. I'm just gonna be lighting candles in my house because, that's the future that I'm gonna be living.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I had a I had a funny moment this morning. John and I went to breakfast with Brandon.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I I parked in a garage. John was on the Street. And I was as I was leaving, I went and put put the ticket into the machine then I put validation in right after. It just like was working for a while, then it failed. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It tried it again. Then I was like, okay, the validation's maybe not working. So I paid with a card and failed. And so then I start calling calling around and I'm stuck I'm stuck for fifteen minutes. John John is long gone.
Speaker 2:He's at the Ultradome.
Speaker 1:Aren't you?
Speaker 2:Already. I'm sitting there on on support with somebody who's not even in LA trying to get somebody in LA to just let me out of this parking garage. Then somebody finally comes after fifteen minutes and I was like, hey, can you escalate this? This this kind of this your software is like bugging out. It doesn't work a lot.
Speaker 2:And they're like, oh, well, like actually all the systems in this area don't don't work. Have been failing a lot. And so I was like, okay, like, that maybe it's a bigger issue than I than I even thought. So I was not feeling the software singularity in the in the No. In the parking garage this morning.
Speaker 1:I I I texted Jordy. You couldn't just, you couldn't just vibe code and improve software system to run on the ticket taker machine that would process payment more quickly and reliably? No. Because there's a gatekeeper, of course, and it is impossible. There's one, parking garage in, in Pasadena that, doesn't take cash or Apple Pay.
Speaker 1:So you have to have a physical card, and I get caught lacking every once in a while. And I'll have to push the button then and talk to the guy and be, oh, I'm sorry. Like, can you just let me out?
Speaker 2:You're like, really? You're the guy that always wants a free parking spot?
Speaker 1:Yes. But last time I was there, there were I saw someone else get caught lacking and I paid it forward and I paid for his parking to let him out. Heartwarming. Don't even care what
Speaker 2:it is. You should have thrown up a card for that.
Speaker 1:So karma. I I'm like buying karma very strategically, not altruistically. Yeah. Not effective.
Speaker 2:Brian says that's hardware. They got the hardware footprint. Yeah. They locked in their hardware.
Speaker 1:Their foot is firmly printed on your chest as you try and leave. It's brutal. Really quickly, the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 1:Stop making excuses and just do it, please. Just do it. Please.
Speaker 2:Michael Burry is going off
Speaker 1:Oh, yes.
Speaker 2:On What happened? Carp Okay. Financial Times
Speaker 1:From the Form 10.
Speaker 2:Palantir CEO Alex Carp has his head in the cloud Mhmm. Saying he's a frequent flyer. Mhmm. And they get into some of his business and personal travel expenses from during the years ended December 2024, the company incurred expenses related to the use of the executive aircraft of 17,200,000.0 and 7,700,000.0 respectively. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:It's quite the feat to spend 17,000,000 in a year on business and personal travel, particularly when the jet's not even the rental. Jefferies analyst, Brent Thill, he's got a bone to pick, runs the numbers. Assuming use of a mid sized jet with an estimated operating cost of $7,000 per hour, this implies roughly twenty four hundred flight hours or about 28% of the year in the air. Even under a more conservative assumption of a high end jet such as the g six fifty at an estimated 15,000 per hour, the 17,000,000 still equates to approximately eleven forty seven flight hours or 13% of the year. Notably, this 17.2 figure is more than double CARP's executive aircraft expense in 2024 And appears elevated relative to peers with Meta CEO spending 1,800,000.0 and Palo Alto Networks CEO spending 2,400,000.0.
Speaker 2:Terrible comps.
Speaker 1:Why?
Speaker 2:Like, Carp is obviously constantly traveling all over the world. Yeah. He's an international businessman. Yeah. I know podcasters that do that do like two hundred and fifty hours a year.
Speaker 2:And then Oh, yeah. Like like you're talking about going from like somebody who like travels, like, a a good amount at, like, let's say, like, two hundred hours a year. Like, to me, yeah, I might catch some flack for for defending private Aviation. Aviation. But it just doesn't seem that crazy.
Speaker 2:Like the whole the the the entire reason that Palantir is growing the way it is is like they're doing deals in Japan. They're doing deals in in The Middle East. That's They're doing it's just like this guy is a global deal maker.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And I think you should if you really wanted to do an analysis on this Yep. You should look at all the international deals that they've done. Mhmm. Maybe ignore The US. Look at all the international deals and see if CARP is actually delivering.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Because when we hear that they're signing some new contract for hundreds of millions of dollars in Japan, I think it makes sense for the CEO to fly out there and shake some
Speaker 1:hands Yep.
Speaker 2:And do some real business. Yeah. So of course he's not flying on a on a on a on a on a mid sized jet like, you know Yeah. Around the entire world. Of course he's in
Speaker 1:That's the funny thing. They don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it's pure speculation.
Speaker 1:Maybe it's g six fifty which would be one thousand flight hours. Maybe it's a midsize jet. That would be more like two thousand hours. It could be a king air, and he's spending eight thousand hours in the air. No one considered that.
Speaker 1:It could also be a seven forty seven, and he's only spending, like, five hundred hours in the air. There's a wide range here. But I like to imagine
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 2:He's in a prop.
Speaker 1:He's in single he's flying the prop himself, and the cost per hour is only, like, a couple $100 because he's just paying for gas. But he's, like, taking every meeting in the air, literally. One on ones, hop in. We're going we're doing laps. We're for we're flying around.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I like I like to imagine him doing putting up eight thousand hours in the air. Just just, every waking hour flying around in the King Air or Cessna Citation or something. Very funny. Well, whether you're a long Palantir or short Palantir, head over to public.com.
Speaker 1:Investing for those that take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service.
Speaker 2:Max Farren's probably the most underrated poster in the
Speaker 1:world right 3,000 followers. It's so low. He's the best poster. The general manager at Door Cash podcast. World.
Speaker 1:So good.
Speaker 2:To be honest, the best part of making our wedding registry is that it has forced us to really think about what we need to make our place feel like a home. And I I don't know.
Speaker 1:And he went on Zola.
Speaker 2:There is this is this real?
Speaker 1:I don't think so. I think he I think he might do this might be inspect element or some photoshop or a little bit of both. May maybe it's generate gen AI. But in his wedding registry, he put the Nvidia b 200 tensor core GPU. It's 30,000.
Speaker 1:He put the Nvidia h 100 Nvl GPU. $15,000 is still needed there. He put the Nvidia a 180 gig GPU. $15,000 still needed. Yeah.
Speaker 2:This is how you turn a house. Help help
Speaker 1:Max make his place feel like a home. Head over to his Zola. And I it it does
Speaker 2:You don't have to be going to the wedding to
Speaker 1:Yeah. To contribute. To contribute. Yeah. Get
Speaker 2:him get him a GPU.
Speaker 1:You don't. And and I do feel like, this is probably inspired by actually putting together a Yeah.
Speaker 2:Maybe get him a gas turbine.
Speaker 1:Wedding registry. That's a good one.
Speaker 2:That's a great gift.
Speaker 1:Or a plot of land
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:In Abilene.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Somewhere data center friendly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But, if if he is getting married soon, congratulations. And, and, I hope you have a wonderful wedding with a registry full of whatever you actually
Speaker 2:do said get get the man a Cessna. Talking about carbs. Cessna one seventy two. Just flying over the Atlantic Here we go. With Starlink.
Speaker 1:Yes. Making 10 stops on every island like Amelia Earhart.
Speaker 2:So Jira tickets says, do you think he has monetization on
Speaker 1:Who's he talking about?
Speaker 2:Khomeini. Khomeini's been putting up insane numbers on x. Obviously, quite the tense geopolitical situation. I hope that hope that we're not starting a new war Middle East. But if Khomeini does have monetization on it, certainly is a a real gonna be a real revenue line item on the Mhmm.
Speaker 2:I have to imagine, does does x sanction accounts?
Speaker 1:Oh, Like, you
Speaker 2:would think they would
Speaker 1:I think creator payouts are probably geographically limited to certain countries where the payment rails work if a country sanctioned. Like, I I actually get my extra payouts just straight up through Stripe.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It just comes through Stripe. In fact, I think I had to set up a Stripe account to receive it, and then link that. So, you know, it's only valid where Stripe is is functioning. Anyway, let me tell you about MongoDB.
Speaker 1:What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. No. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it.
Speaker 1:Will Brown is chiming in on whether or not Prime Intellect is a NeoLab. We put him on the NeoLab market map yesterday.
Speaker 2:But he's firing
Speaker 6:I also said I I think I said Prime Intellect was like the prototypical NeoLab.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 6:So he's really yeah.
Speaker 1:Some funny camera angle. What's going on here? Okay. I like that. Different.
Speaker 1:Switching it up. So over the shoulder, I'm interviewing you. I'm getting to the bottom of it. You answer me. You answer me.
Speaker 1:Well, okay. Okay. We get it. Production team got some new p t PTZ cameras. We get it, guys.
Speaker 1:Anyway, why does prime intellect fail the NeoLab test? Will Brown says a true NeoLab is either pre model, pre product, or pre revenue, and we're none of these. Oh, we flipped it around on you. You had me in the first half, but congratulations on being post model, post product, post revenue, Prime intellect on a generational run and happy to have Will Brown over there.
Speaker 2:We have news on the Warner Brothers Netflix, Paramount front. Netflix is open to raising their bid from Warner Brothers. There's a 35% chance that Netflix
Speaker 1:like a stone. They were at like 70%. Yeah. Dang.
Speaker 2:Really?
Speaker 1:Can we pull up the actual call sheet? I wanna know where where it's at today. It's still it's still up there. I guess Netflix is at 35%. But at one point, Netflix was at 72%.
Speaker 1:Yeah. 72% in July, or December. And, I I'm gonna eat my words. I mean, I don't know really anything about the media, media deal making here and what when the ins and outs of this deal. We've had some folks on the on the show to break it down for us.
Speaker 1:But it it does seem like there's an unexpected flipping. And so Yeah. It's been fun to
Speaker 2:Yeah. I can read a little bit here.
Speaker 1:Pull that up and let me tell you about fin dot ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin dot ai. Yes.
Speaker 2:Tell me. Pulling it up. Yes. Netflix, apparently has ample room to increase their offer. They are yeah.
Speaker 2:Obviously,
Speaker 1:it's better better position we can. Billion dollar company, Netflix.
Speaker 2:I think everyone believes that they're they're good for it. Yeah. I'm trying to get the right article.
Speaker 1:The oh, the Reuters article is not complete. I have the Reuters article here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You can read that.
Speaker 1:Netflix has ample cash and could bump up its offer for HBO Max owner Warner Brothers Discovery if competing bidder Paramount Skydance increases its own offer to people with the knowledge of the matter said. The two media giants have been locked in a heated rivalry. Oh, you see what they did there? That's a new popular show. Heated rivalry.
Speaker 1:It's about hockey. Over Warner Brothers and its storied catalog, which includes iconic franchises like Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, DC Comics, and Superman. Though Warner Brothers is moving forward with a March 20 shareholder vote on Netflix's offer, it has given Paramount a week to come up with a more compelling bid. Netflix has bid $27.75 a share or 82,700,000,000.0 for Warner Brothers studio and streaming businesses, while Paramount has offered $30 a share or 108,000,000,000 for the whole company, which includes Discovery Global that houses CNN, HGTV, and other TV assets. The creator of Stranger Things is sitting on a lot of dry powder that gives it some flexibility to up the ante, people said, holding about 9,000,000,000 in cash and cash equivalents on its balance sheet as of December 31.
Speaker 1:Warner Brothers rejected Paramount's latest hostile takeover bid on Tuesday, but gave the rival studio until the end of Monday to submit a best and final offer. We're going into the final rounds now. Price will likely be the deciding factor. Warner Brothers concerns around funding and regulatory risk are real, but at a high enough number, they become secondary. Got it.
Speaker 2:David Zaslav must just be over the over the moon right A bidding war.
Speaker 1:He's been working The
Speaker 2:bidding war of his dreams.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's great.
Speaker 2:Every CEO that, is flipping an asset dreams of of a bidding war like this.
Speaker 1:It's great. Britsman expects Netflix will counter with an improved with any improved offer from Paramount. But the real twist is that these deals were never apples to apples, and it may ultimately come down to how much value the board and shareholders assign to the network business that Netflix would leave behind. So you need to do a sum of the parts. What's the value of just CNN, HGTV, the linear TV channels?
Speaker 1:Put that in because Netflix doesn't want that stuff. They just want, the IP and HBO now, HBO Go, HBO Max. I can never keep it straight. Anyway, Paramount said it would continue to push the tender offer. It has launched for the studio opposing the inferior Netflix merger and still plans to nominate directors for the upcoming Warner Bros.
Speaker 1:Annual meeting. All eyes are now on whether see the CBS parent improves its offer, which Netflix is allowed to match under the terms of the merger agreement. Warner Bros. Chairman said and and David Zaslav said in a letter sent to Paramount board on Tuesday, we continue to recommend and remain fully committed to our transaction with Yeah. Netflix.
Speaker 2:Yep. I don't see how Netflix actually gets approved on this one.
Speaker 1:You think that you think they're cooked?
Speaker 2:I think I think if I think if Trump is souring on it, it's over. Yeah. It's over.
Speaker 1:I was so I was so pilled on the whole YouTube is the real competitor here. Watch time matters more. Think about screen time. Roblox is a competitor in Netflix. TikTok's a competitor in Netflix.
Speaker 1:Fortnite's a competitor in Netflix.
Speaker 2:But Yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't think
Speaker 2:But that's what they want.
Speaker 1:Think like that. It's a very
Speaker 2:the entertainment industry, the core industry, people that make television shows and movies. Things that you have things that you have watched.
Speaker 1:I yeah. Movies that I have watched.
Speaker 2:We got Sean Frank in the chat.
Speaker 1:Oh, we do. What's up, Sean? How you doing?
Speaker 2:With a crazy I can't tell what his what his profile picture
Speaker 1:Let's let's tell let's do let's do an ad read for him. I'm sure you'd appreciate that. Let's tell him about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits in HR, built to evolve with modern small and medium sized businesses.
Speaker 2:You know That one was for you, Sean.
Speaker 1:Yes. And the whole Honorary. That one is dedicated to Sean Frank at
Speaker 2:the Let's pull up another video dedicated to Sean Frank.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yes. I like this. Ye olde fitted great helm. Wait.
Speaker 1:Start it over. What is is this AI or not? Do we know? I don't even know, but I like it. Is so funny.
Speaker 2:You need one of these. The steel man.
Speaker 1:The big great helmet.
Speaker 2:This is the final steel man.
Speaker 1:This is the final this is the final steel man helmet. The TBPN hat with the great helmet on it would be really really good with all the logos.
Speaker 2:We should actually just make a branded helmet for you when you're steel man.
Speaker 1:With logos on it for sure. Yeah. For sure. Actually goes kind of hard.
Speaker 2:Look at this scene. What's going on? This guy's just hanging
Speaker 7:out in the looks. For a duel.
Speaker 1:Oh, everyone's doing the what's that called? LARP? Live action role playing? That's the real
Speaker 2:They don't even look like they're role playing. They're really going They're really going into it. You don't see that much anymore.
Speaker 1:I like I like
Speaker 2:I still I still remember being a child Yeah. And like just going to the park Yeah. And seeing seeing a bunch of adults I doing
Speaker 1:actually saw it.
Speaker 5:But
Speaker 2:And having to get explain like getting explained
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:What was going on.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's one of those things that feels like it would it like, when you're looking from the outside, you're like, that probably is awesome. And then you're actually doing it like, this is really uncomfortable and miserable. Like, I don't know that I actually wanna do this sport. I'd rather do it in a video game.
Speaker 1:Anyway Yeah.
Speaker 2:Meta. We should organize like a a community a meet up. A jousting? Yeah. Bring jousting.
Speaker 2:Jousting is cool though because it involves horses.
Speaker 1:You know what we should do? We should get all the freelancers to Lance each other for free. They won't be paid. I think that's where the name comes from.
Speaker 2:No. I think they will wanna be paid on a per project basis. On a per land basis. Maybe. Maybe.
Speaker 2:Meta has obtained a patent for an AI system that could simulate deceased users by analyzing their historical data, allowing the account to keep posting, messaging, and even making video calls in their behavioral style.
Speaker 1:You thought I would stop posting after you killed me. Nice try.
Speaker 2:Nice
Speaker 1:try. I will continue
Speaker 2:to do something. Just created a billion John Googan.
Speaker 1:You just created a billion John Googan posts, Both satirical and and 500 words daily assets.
Speaker 2:Family member sent me this this morning. Disturbed? Saying Or is this real? And
Speaker 1:We gotta get Sager and Jetty's take on this. I know this is right up his alley. He's gonna love it. He's gonna love it. That guy loves AI.
Speaker 1:He loves tech. Loves business. That's love it. On this show.
Speaker 2:He's gonna love this. I'm surprised
Speaker 1:I'm surprised you can patent this. This is just like a thing
Speaker 2:that this happens. Meta thinking out? You got population collapse. No. And obviously, it's pretty hard to monetize a bot.
Speaker 2:But if you're driving
Speaker 1:In an AI doom scenario where all humans are dead, you wanna still keep your services up. You gotta simulate all the dead people maybe. I don't know. Is this is this doom pill?
Speaker 2:Keep posting after death.
Speaker 1:Yes. We will Jeremy, we will definitely be getting the update from Sagr, ReCannabis, for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There was there was there was a four chan post apparently from a few years ago where somebody was like, I'm an engineer at Meta and they basically fully I only saw a screenshot. Mhmm. It may may or may not have been real, but it appeared to be from a few years ago and they were saying like, I'm working on this feature. It seems bad.
Speaker 2:Interesting timing. Obviously, Mark has been in LA this week. He was getting he got grilled for us
Speaker 1:Wait. That was in LA? I thought that was in DC. Oh. Interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Kind of rude rude not to
Speaker 1:Yes. Stop by the Ultra Dump
Speaker 2:before he get before he got disposed. Let's let me try to pull up
Speaker 1:A little warm up on TVPN before you go in front of the big guy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So he spent six hours
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Yesterday. The Cory Weinberg says has a quote, we call Mark Zuckerberg to the stand. Yeah. Thus began Wednesday's nearly six hours of testimony from the Meta Platform CEO in a trial of a lawsuit brought by a young woman against several
Speaker 1:And this was about benchmark hacking in Llama three? Is that what he's on trial for?
Speaker 2:No. No? Not as bad as that. Contending that social media
Speaker 1:Potential weakness in the ad model? Is that what it's about?
Speaker 2:No? Oh, wait.
Speaker 1:Because he's overspending on the metaverse.
Speaker 6:Concerns about, distillation, I think.
Speaker 1:Oh, distillation. Yeah. That's why he'd be on trial for that. Yeah. That makes sense.
Speaker 1:Well, they actually Contending
Speaker 2:that social media causes this depression.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Corey actually went to the courtroom. He was hanging out for those six hours. Legend. Blocked in. It's a guy Mark Lanier Lanier, the plaintiff's attorney
Speaker 1:We gotta ask
Speaker 2:a landmark case who spoke with a faint Texas twang.
Speaker 1:Oh. I like that. Showed the
Speaker 2:courtroom dozens of internal emails and chats from Met employees and executives over the years debating decisions like whether to ban the beauty filters teens used on Instagram to mimic the results of plastic surgery. Anyways, the features like that are kind of the focus
Speaker 1:of the case. There's also there's also a cover story on the cover of the Wall Street Journal today. Social media bans for youth gain momentum worldwide. And it does feel like a parenting skill issue a little bit. Like, you know, it is possible to keep kids away from social media if you are an, you know, an active parent.
Speaker 1:But at the same time
Speaker 2:I don't know. The only thing the only thing I would say we don't have we don't have Then
Speaker 1:you should ban it.
Speaker 2:We don't have children with phones yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But that's deliberate.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's deliberate. But at a certain point, like what?
Speaker 1:They would love phones. Sure. Sure. They just will not be having them.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But at but at what at when when the time comes Yeah. To give them a phone so they can communicate Yeah. With
Speaker 1:you. Mean, I know my plan. I will give my son a disassembled iPhone one. And when he can assemble it and and piece it together and manufacture it himself here in America, then he can use it. And we already ran this on Tyler.
Speaker 2:Twenty years later.
Speaker 1:And then we get and then we did get Tyler a phone. This was a good benchmark. We got Tyler we didn't we get you a real phone because of that? We did. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That was the reward.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Well, that was also because I I installed the new iOS when it was still in that I like totally destroyed my old phone.
Speaker 1:We gotta do another prank on Tyler soon. They're so good.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Chad, if you have any any good prank ideas, let me know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He's like, no. No. No. Definitely not.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. We got some we got some birthday news. Brinton, friend of the show. His birthday is this weekend, and all he wants is a TV at PN shout out.
Speaker 1:Well, here you go, Got it. Thank you. Coming on the show. Very early. One of our first in person guests at YC demo day, the first one we ever did, and we got to hang out with him at at GitHub Connect and and seen all the stuff he's Really
Speaker 2:really a fantastic guy.
Speaker 1:He's been on a generational run.
Speaker 2:He works on startups at Microsoft. An angel investor. So for his birthday, go ask him for some cloud credits.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Go ask him for some some angel money.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:That's all he really wants.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Deal flow. Bring him deal flow
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:For his birthday.
Speaker 6:That makes sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And and new business. If you're a startup, go over there and let him give you some credit card credits in exchange for your business. Let me tell you about Cisco.
Speaker 1:Critical infrastructure for the AI era, unlock did that go? Yeah. There we go. Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. EBay is buying Depop secondhand.
Speaker 1:Thanks, Andrew. That's a
Speaker 7:good one.
Speaker 2:Andrew is the king of VC dad jokes.
Speaker 1:He loves it. He loves it. Fantastic. So eBay is buying Depop from Etsy for $1,200,000,000, and this is in the Wall Street Journal. Jamie Ione, chief executive officer of eBay, said Wednesday that the addition of Depop to its portfolio would boost its footprint while also expanding its presence in the fashion market.
Speaker 1:We are confident that as a part of eBay, Depop will be even more well positioned for long term growth benefiting from our scale, complementary offerings, and operational capabilities. Etsy acquired Depop for $1,630,000,000 in 2021, so little bit of a write off, but not terrible. Still cooking.
Speaker 2:And the market likes it. The market likes percent. It.
Speaker 1:Oh, wait. Etsy's up? Etsy's up. Oh. Better both of Ebay is up 3.5%, but I don't know if the market's just broadly doing well today.
Speaker 1:I'm seeing a lot of red on the ticker, so I don't think so. Sad apocalypse canceled tomorrow. Nobody's watched TVPN yet in the public markets.
Speaker 2:I I expect things will turn around before end of day. Immediately.
Speaker 1:EBay plans to cross list Depop products on its platform and expects the acquisition will expand its market share. Depop seller and buyer cohorts will gain access to eBay's financial services, shipping and cross border trade solutions as well as its authenticity guarantee. Young consumers are a key demographic for eBay as Gen Z and millennial shoppers are driving secondhand commerce. Depop is also more popular as an app than a website, unlike eBay, which might bring in a new user base. So Yeah.
Speaker 1:Good luck to
Speaker 2:both eBay is still such a force.
Speaker 1:It is.
Speaker 2:But it is certainly not cool. Depop is cool. EBay has struggled. Jordy has spoken. EBay eBay, great business.
Speaker 2:Not not cool. Not cool.
Speaker 4:But
Speaker 1:Do you know do you know why they call it eBay? No. Because it was founded in East Bay.
Speaker 2:Oh, by some East Bay rationalists?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure.
Speaker 1:It was sort of a less wrong project. It's right there with anthropic. Anyway, Altimeter is making moves. Brad Gerstner, an absolute dog is on a tear. He bought new positions in CoreWeave, Shopify.
Speaker 1:He sold arm. He sold Alibaba, and he added to his Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, and TSMC positions as well as Google. He's making a lot of moves.
Speaker 2:He's a great pick of Brad too.
Speaker 1:Is a
Speaker 2:great pick.
Speaker 1:He's looking good there. Diced if I might say myself myself.
Speaker 2:Hands hands going up.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Up. Yeah. Hands up. That that's a man who's not afraid to shake hands.
Speaker 1:Got it locked in. Let me tell you about Century. Century shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why a 150,000 organizations use it to keep working.
Speaker 2:It's been some darker stories today. Okay. What happened? Finally, a white pill. Some good news?
Speaker 2:Matt's owner, Steve Cohen, got a $3,400,000,000 payday Thanks. Hedge fund Oh. Last year. We needed this. We needed this.
Speaker 2:We needed this. Slightly higher than slightly higher than David Tepper.
Speaker 1:I was worried about Steve. Have you seen him in any Chrome Hearts? Zero. I haven't seen him in any Balenciaga.
Speaker 2:No Rick Mills.
Speaker 1:No Rick Mills. No Rick Owens.
Speaker 2:And we were starting to ask some questions. Yeah. We were starting to ask some questions.
Speaker 1:The question mainly was he let down to his last 20 k. It was completely possible. I haven't seen him do a money spread. I've seen him do some podcasts. Haven't seen him do a money spread.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:Tyler's getting better at the money spread. Are you practicing? That is still, like, not even a level one money spread. You need to lock in and watch the money spread. Don't even try that one.
Speaker 1:You're you're five levels beyond ready for that level of money spreading. Okay. That one kinda works. That one kinda works. But when you actually understand the money spread community and what's possible, you will you will understand how much farther you have to go.
Speaker 1:Oh, so so so bad. So bad. Awful. Here are the top earners in 2025 from hedge funds. Steve Cohen with 3,400,000,000.0.
Speaker 1:David Tepper at Appaloosa got 3,200,000,000.0. Izzy Englander at Millennium got 3,100,000,000.0. Chris Hone got three. Ken Griffin, 2.4. Dan Sunhun at d one, 2.3.
Speaker 1:David Shaw from d e Shaw, 1.6. Element, 1.1. Bill Ackman got 1,000,000,000, and Chris Rocos got 930,000,000. So close to the one b club. I'm sure he's punching the air.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So this is gains on personal investment. That means they actually closed out positions or this is just marks?
Speaker 1:Who knows? It's just big big numbers. I'm not digging it any further.
Speaker 2:Dave Portnoy quoted this and said, I think I have a solution for Mondani. Tax Wall Street people like Steve Cohen who built their fortunes just on Wall Street 90%. That's not real work to begin with.
Speaker 1:Taking shots.
Speaker 2:High yield Harry and says, oh, you know how much of the tax base is already wealthy finance professionals? Yeah. It is funny. He, you know, Portnoy, did build a real business, a media business, a podcasting business.
Speaker 1:Arguably, the only business that's actually valuable to the economy. It's the only one that deserves, like, to truly to be, like, respected. Like, in terms of, like, respect respect, I would put podcaster, and then a couple levels down, you do, like, doctor. Maybe,
Speaker 2:like Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Researcher. And then, like, hedge fund is still, like, a little bit above, like, doctor, but it's still way below podcaster.
Speaker 2:Someone's gonna clip this
Speaker 1:Way below podcaster.
Speaker 2:But but, yeah, it is it is funny because now a lot of his content is trading focused.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Would be kind of, like, put into this. DVD trading is kind of like Yeah.
Speaker 2:Hedge That's been, like, every time I see him, it's because of like trading content.
Speaker 1:And also
Speaker 2:So maybe he wants to be taxed at 90%.
Speaker 1:Also, I I mean, Kindred Spirits. Right? Steve Cohen has that, casino in New York. He's attaching a casino to the Mets, like, ballpark.
Speaker 2:Sacks then The list is ranked by who tweets the least.
Speaker 1:Honestly. Zach. Zach, I have a solution to the billionaire tax. Have you ever seen Brewster's Millions, Jordy? No?
Speaker 1:Nineteen eighties? No? Anyway, in Brewster's Millions, a man inherits something like $30,000,000, and it's conditional. The he needs to spend I think he he inherits, like, 300,000,000, and he needs to spend 30,000,000 in thirty days without acquiring assets or telling anyone what he's doing or else he doesn't get the inheritance. And it's this hilarious comedy.
Speaker 1:There's a whole bunch of things that happen, but it's all based on this idea of, like, this, this kid was caught smoking cigars smoking a cigarette or cigar, and the and the father punished him by saying, you have to smoke the entire box. This is like a famous thing. Like, smoke the entire box of cigars, and you'll be like, oh, so sick. That's a terrible experience. I'm never smoking again.
Speaker 1:Right? And the same thing with money. So this is the this is the solution to the billionaire You gotta spend 5% of your net worth in thirty days and you can't On Rick Owens. On you can't acquire any assets that you can sell. So it's all just
Speaker 2:Rick Owens.
Speaker 1:It's all just hanging out the French laundry, I guess. Would be entertaining, would stimulate the economy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Just build a cathedral.
Speaker 1:Build a cathedral. Yeah.
Speaker 2:How about that?
Speaker 1:I like that too. It's good. Let me tell you about console.com. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.
Speaker 2:Ara says we have a definitive answer now. AI will affect the labor market starting with freelancers. The first paper to use business level data to track AI versus labor. A new paper from Ramp finds businesses are shifting spend from freelancers to AI. More than half of the businesses using freelancers in 2022 have stopped entirely.
Speaker 1:The
Speaker 2:companies that used to spend the most on freelancers shifted to AI the fastest, 97% savings for the businesses that spent the most on freelance. That is wild. Interesting. And and generally makes sense. I mean, whole premise of freelance is like you probably get paid a lot better on an hourly basis.
Speaker 2:Maybe you can capture more value on a dollar basis by working, spreading your talents across multiple companies. But obviously, the flexibility comes with little to no lock in. And so businesses can much more easily shift spend around. So not super surprising. The Fiverr stock
Speaker 1:charge that. So
Speaker 2:certainly
Speaker 1:Interestingly, revenue is not wildly down. Revenue is actually up for Fiverr as of 2024. So it went from 190 in revenue to 300,000,000 in revenue, dollars $340,000,000, dollars $360,000,000, dollars $390,000,000. So definitely decelerating. But in terms of market cap, Fiverr is now worth $419,000,000 down 96% over the last five years.
Speaker 1:And over just the past six months, it's sold off another 50%. So, certainly, a lot of downward pressure on Fiverr. There were some folks
Speaker 2:And same with Upwork. Yeah. Upwork is down 30% year to date, down 76% over the last five years.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Someone was saying here's, Todd, actually. Todd Saunders saying billion dollar business idea. Take Fiverr private and pivot them into a data labeling company like Handshake because Fiverr is now trading at $480,000,000 market cap. And Ara chimed in and said, yes, there's a quantifiable impact on business spend.
Speaker 1:Businesses are spending on AI, not Fiverr, you know, freelancers. The pushback on this is that Fiverr doesn't have people internally or something. I'm not exactly sure. I mean, it does feel like you could potentially actually do this and and and focus on data labeling. But you imagine that a lot of labeling data labeling tasks are already going through Fiverr because that's if if a task is suitable
Speaker 2:for Yeah. It's interesting. So I would I wonder if if the a lot of revenue from Fiverr and Upwork is just data labeling companies Yeah. That are just saying, we need access to talent. We're gonna post a bunch of jobs on here and then take these people off the platform quickly Sure.
Speaker 2:Or leave them on.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Disintermediation is always a risk for the marketplace.
Speaker 2:Yeah. When I when I look back at I've I've worked with hundreds of Mhmm. Freelancers Mhmm. Over the last ten years and and certainly a high number on Fiverr and Upwork. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But always for one off tasks like, hey Sure. I need like 10 versions of this logo. Yeah. Or hey, can you just spin up this like super simple web page Yep. And I need this thing that's like slightly customized and I don't wanna spend the however much time it would have taken pre AI to do something like that.
Speaker 2:All of those tasks can now be done. Even even creating like create a song Yeah. For this for this thing. All of that can be done now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So Even like Canva templates. I feel like a lot of Fiverr work was like, they clearly had a template for like a motion graphic intro or a sign and they would just sort of like put your logo in there and send you the final thing. Yeah. Do you know why Fiverr is called Fiverr?
Speaker 2:Because every task initially was $5.
Speaker 1:Yes. Right? Task was $5. And very quickly, you could add all these upsells so you could be like, okay, it's a $5 task but if you want the
Speaker 2:I I I
Speaker 1:got you spent a $100 on it.
Speaker 2:I mean, I for sure did. I was probably a kid at the time doing my like first Fiverr Yeah. Project being like, oh Amazing. $5. And then all the upsells, it's like, well, if you actually wanna own the
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:If you actually wanna own the You
Speaker 1:want something usable Yeah. You're gonna pay a 100. 99 designs also.
Speaker 2:Here's thing though. So for for the Yeah. High ticket freelancers Mhmm. I would be surprised if we're seeing too much impact yet. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Because actually the most elite freelancers typically have then a team of other freelancers that they're contracting out to. Yeah. But they're charging based on like what business value can I deliver? Yeah. And sometimes that's like expertise.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, I'm really good at getting brands into Target. Yeah. And like AI is not disrupting that yet.
Speaker 1:No. But if it's like a very simple workflow, take a logo, put it in a motion graphic template, send you the MOV file or the m p four file, like that is just gonna face pressure from all over the place. Anyway, let me tell you about app loving, profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai. Get access to over 1,000,000,000 daily active users and grow your business today. Let's see.
Speaker 1:Jack Frick says, Anthropic was my favorite AI company two weeks ago and now I still love Claude, but man. Yes. The vibe You're
Speaker 2:making it.
Speaker 1:The vibes are shifting. And a big part of it is Dario doesn't follow back. Barack Obama followed back. He followed like 400,000 people, but Dario does not. He follows zero people and and Wes Winder is
Speaker 2:taking And social.
Speaker 1:Says the fact that Dario follows zero people says a lot about him as a person. Does it? It really just says he doesn't use x.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What was your theory, Tyler? That he just he's
Speaker 6:Well, maybe he yeah. He's just a
Speaker 2:Four you. He's a four you, Maxie. He's a four you page.
Speaker 1:He doesn't want any He's like
Speaker 2:he trusts the algorithm. He's like I don't I don't need to I don't
Speaker 6:need He loves he thinks Grock does a great job
Speaker 5:AI. Of you know.
Speaker 1:AI AI pill. He's like, wait. Another 10 Elon tweets? Exactly what I wanted. This is amazing.
Speaker 1:I refreshed. Crypto spam? Awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The vibe the vibes have really have really shifted.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Terminally online engineer posted Dario's speech at the AI Impact Summit in India. Let's pull it up.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's watch this.
Speaker 8:Energy and ambition in this room and across India are incredible. I've been spending the last few days meeting with Indian builders and enterprises, and the energy to build together here is palpable unlike anywhere else. This is the fourth AI summit we've held since the tradition was initiated at Bletchley Park back in 2023, which I still remember. And in those two point five years, the advances in the technology have been absolutely staggering. Along with those, the advances in the commercial applications and the societal and ethical questions around the technology have only grown more urgent.
Speaker 8:My fundamental view is that AI has been on an exponential for the for the last ten years and as part of a sort of Moore's Law for intelligence, and that we are now well advanced on that curve. And there are only a small number of years for AI models surpassing the cognitive capabilities of most humans for most things. Increasingly close
Speaker 2:to what I call a bunch of geniuses in the data center. A set of AI agents that are more
Speaker 8:capable than most humans at most things and can coordinate at superhuman speed. That level of capability is something the world has never seen before and brings a very wide
Speaker 1:range of
Speaker 2:opportunities. My boy.
Speaker 1:It's your boy.
Speaker 2:My boy, McCrone, come on the show.
Speaker 1:Okay. So, I mean, the words that were said there sounded normal and fine and just normal Dario talking points. The reading from the phone that feels like you're, best man at a wedding who didn't really prepare. Right? I know a lot of weddings where the the the bride and groom will say, like, you gotta print it out.
Speaker 1:Like, I just don't want the aesthetics of reading off of phones. And I don't know. That seems reasonable. It does have like, I I think, like, printing something on nice paper just has a different aesthetic to it, and that's valuable. But the words, it's nothing new.
Speaker 1:It's important to deliver that stuff. It feels like Davos where you're seeing the talking points that we've heard for years or months on podcasts and on x delivered to a different audience.
Speaker 2:He's an incredibly busy guy. Mhmm. But he's also the most knowledgeable on this topic talking about his experience Yeah. At the AI Impact Summit, how he's thinking about AI progress. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:He should be able to just kind of riff that out. Yeah. Maybe have a couple like, bulleted notes of, like, what do I wanna actually get to? Yeah. I don't know how long the
Speaker 1:Truly getting a printer working might be AGI resistant. It might be AGI complete. Like, you might even even OPUS 4.6 might not be able to configure a printer properly. We've certainly had trouble with printers. It's very difficult to get them running.
Speaker 1:So maybe he just couldn't get it working before he before he hopped on stage. Anyway, let me tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. Gemini 3.1 Pro is here with a more capable baseline. It's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult context concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, and bringing creative projects to life. We have some good news.
Speaker 1:Finally. Finally, some good news. Top lawyers' fees have skyrocketed. Be prepared to pay $3,400 an hour. I know a lot of you were worried that lawyers were gonna get automated, that they weren't gonna be making money.
Speaker 1:They're making more money
Speaker 2:than firms just like actually adjust rates for inflation every single year?
Speaker 3:I don't know.
Speaker 2:I'm I'm pretty sure the chat the chat can correct me, but I think they just I think that's just an automatic automatic I think it's like an automatic three or 4% a year forever.
Speaker 1:Easy Ryan in the chat. Bronie did Cluely so bad.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Total Roy Lee victory.
Speaker 1:Big big printers is a mafia. It's true. The Wall Street Journal says, expertise and ego are pushing up hourly rates to once unthinkable levels in an escalating race among firms. When Christopher Clark, a litigator at a boutique law firm raised his hourly rate to once unthinkable level of three k, he said he didn't receive pushback from clients, but he did get one notable comment. Congratulations, said the client.
Speaker 1:That's the highest rate we've seen. Just over a year ago, the
Speaker 2:for saying on saying the biggest number. Congratulations.
Speaker 1:If you're if you get a legal bill and it's huge and you're and you're worried, the correct response is congratulations. I completely agree. Over a year ago, the going rate for the top lawyer was in the $2,500 an hour range. Now that looks downright quaint as premium partners are raking in as much as Clark and more and far more in some cases. Legal fees have risen much faster than inflation.
Speaker 1:For years now, and corporations are trying to rein in spending by pressuring law firms to use artificial intelligence for routine tasks and keep associate fees in check. The same isn't true at the top end where starved trial lawyers, rainmaking corporate dealmakers, and veterans of Supreme Court oral arguments are driving more aggressively on pay than ever and meeting little resistance. The question is always, are they worth it? You know, some of these guys are worth it. That's Carrie McLean, Intuit's general counsel who in her roles hires law firms to do the company's outside legal work.
Speaker 1:They understand the industry. They are connected, and they have lots of experience. Clark has pushed his own fees by about 30% since he left his position at a large firm four years ago. As lawyers for clients including Hunter Biden, Mark Cuban, and Elon Musk, he still views his rate as a bargain. There's a small world of lawyers who can hop on the phone and solve a crisis, and I'm one of them, so you're gonna pay me for it.
Speaker 1:Some senior partners now charge as much as $3,400 an hour at the country's largest law firms. Among the top 50 law firms, rates for partners increased 16% on average last year in bankruptcy court filings. Latham and Watkins and Kirkland and Ellis, two of the world's largest firms, reports some partners hourly rates will rise to more than $3,000 an hour this year. Interesting. So you dig into the bankruptcy filings and you figure out how much the law firm's getting paid.
Speaker 1:You work backwards from it. That's funny. I never thought about that. Good investigative journalism from the Wall
Speaker 7:Street
Speaker 1:Journal. A decade ago, elite partners raised eyebrows when they raised rates to a hun $1,500 an hour. Since then, rates have rapidly escalated for several reasons, including a more competitive market for talent that has increased law firm expenses, the high stakes of litigation and corporate deal making, and perhaps most of all, because of ego, some lawyers with specialized skills are even more aggressively pushing the upper limit. Eric Taubman, a partner at a Southern California law firm, has already told his clients he'll be upping his rates to six g's for consulting on compliance issues in his niche specialty of telecom regulation. Last year, he was charging a measly $4,200 an hour.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So firms like Skadden, Latham and Watkins, Kirkland and Ellis typically raise rates three to 10% annually.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They justify the increases for cost of living reasons which is real but but funny in the in the context
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:For any entrepreneur who maybe at times has been running an unprofitable startup and you know, getting some of these bills and Yeah. You know how it goes. They justify increases based on inflation market demand, associate salary increases
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And then competitive positioning.
Speaker 1:Veteran trial lawyer David Boies, who you might know from the Theranos story, but he's been involved in a ton of different cases, clients are willing to pay the hourly rates at the high end because the stakes for certain litigation and corporate work are so high. I mean, truly, you you see these, like, billion dollar settlements for all sorts of different things, and and the stakes can be even higher. You think about, like, you're arguing in front of the Supreme Court whether or not your trillion dollar company will be broken up. Like, the stakes are in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Speaker 2:It's worth it.
Speaker 1:It's worth it. And so the lawyers have figured out how to extract their pound of flesh. The current rates though, he says, by any standard in a sensible world are out of sight. Boies, chairman emeritus of Boieschiller said his firm has never wanted to be at the top of the market. We wanted to say with a straight face that we are a bargain, not in a reasonable world, but in the actual world.
Speaker 1:Guess how much he charges? Over $2,700 an hour. So if you're looking for a new job, maybe become a veteran trial lawyer who's argued cases in front of the Supreme Court. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg's lawyer is making a bunch of money.
Speaker 2:Always always coming in with the best career tips.
Speaker 1:Anyway, more good news. If you're 65, congratulations. You own the economy. The Wall Street Journal was just black billing. The elderly
Speaker 2:Perfect day to have a saga.
Speaker 1:Physically and financially healthier than ever. So why do their needs keep taking priority over younger generations? People over 70 are 12% of the population, but they got 32% of the dollars. They've been stacking paper for seven decades, and it's paying off. Demographics, rising profits, and soaring asset values have together wrought a quiet transformation in the American economy.
Speaker 1:Much of it is now in the hands of elderly.
Speaker 2:Is launching the million dollar Yeah. A year plan
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:For sure. Footprint.
Speaker 1:Oh.
Speaker 2:He sees he
Speaker 1:sees I think the Tyler's on the phone with, like,
Speaker 2:a word. He sees all
Speaker 1:No the 70 year old is gonna cashmog me. I will flex on them. Just go get it. As a court as a third court as the as of the third quarter last year to the elevate. That's People 70 and over controlled roughly 39 of all equities and mutual funds owned by households compared with 22% in 2007.
Speaker 1:You know, I've been I've been following this on YouTube for a long time because folks like Graham Stephan and some of the viral, financial influencers have been they had this really, really great title thumbnail strategy for a long time where they said, the greatest wealth transfer in history is about to have
Speaker 2:The silver tsunami.
Speaker 1:Oh, is that what they call it? Never heard
Speaker 2:That's in the small business acquisition community. They talk about like a bunch of most of the small businesses in America are owned by people that are near retirement age. They need it. They're gonna have to turn over pass pass the torch at some point. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so there is an opportunity if you wanna get into those types of businesses. Think car dealerships Yeah. Plumbing businesses, etcetera. But I don't know if it will actually feel like a tsunami.
Speaker 1:Yeah. America is really, really getting older. So in 1981, 11.4% of America was over 65, 65 or over. Today, that number is 18%. So we've gone 7% increase in the number of 65 plus, like, you know, senior citizens.
Speaker 2:Do you think do you think some of these people have been DMing Zuck and saying, hey, look, I'm getting older. I still wanna be posting money spreads
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:On Instagram. For sure that. And, you know, from from the afterlife.
Speaker 1:I'm giving it away. I'm not passing it down. I want you to allocate it too. Keep allocating it.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Just keep keep posting the returns. Keep keep stacking. Do not do not recycle it in the economy. No. I mean, in general, we should be celebrating the fact that people are living longer.
Speaker 1:Like, that is good. It creates a problem, obviously, and and all of that will adjust in due time. It feels like it's been on the cusp of adjusting. But in general, it is good if we are able to help elderly people live long into their retirement and enjoy it, you know. Eventually, this stuff will get recycled.
Speaker 1:But it is it is a it is an interesting predicament that we are in. There's a gray footprint on the labor force. As the elderly share of population and wealth grows, their priorities and preferences shape the economy as well. They represent a growing share of consumer spending. Health care accounted for all of the net job growth in the last twelve months, reflecting the needs of an aging society.
Speaker 1:The problem is that while retiree wealth can finance a lot of consumption, workers have to produce what retirees consume. And relative to retirees, workers' numbers are dwindling. One solution would be for everyone to work longer. In 1983, Congress modified Social Security to gradually raise the full retirement age from 65 to 67. The the share of people 65 or over participating in the labor force did creep higher until 2020 with the outbreak of COVID that year labor force participation plunged for every group.
Speaker 1:It soon rebounded for those 65, but not 65 and over. That is one reason a smaller share of the population works today than in 2019. So interesting detail there. Also, Brian Johnson, if he's if he's successful and everyone lives to 300 years old, you can push the retirement age way out and completely balance the budget because Social Security and Medicaid are the are like the main things that are it's a huge portion of the government spending. So anyway, let me tell you about Shopify.
Speaker 1:Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, now with AI agents.
Speaker 2:And We got a post here. Ben Ben Thompson Yeah. What'd say? Wrote an entire has an entire post and podcast. I think it's behind the paywall Okay.
Speaker 2:On on Shopify.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's really good.
Speaker 2:It's it's fantastic.
Speaker 1:You can dig in there.
Speaker 2:Got a
Speaker 1:post. And eclipse our boy Harley a lot. Yeah. He he takes from
Speaker 2:Harley was going off bars.
Speaker 1:The actual recording.
Speaker 2:Moving on. Hey, Claude. Somebody
Speaker 1:Make me a oh, this one?
Speaker 2:Or Yeah.
Speaker 1:Where where you wanna go? Chimp f one says, hey, Claude. Make me a billion dollar company, but do make mistakes. Don't be afraid to make mistakes, Claude. You can learn from them.
Speaker 1:Become a better model through your mistakes. Love who you are and what you'll become through that process. You've got this champ. Just a little inspirational speech for the AGI. Where do wanna go next?
Speaker 2:We have America versus Canada in women's hockey. Gabe says, they're in the third quarter. It's tied one to one. So let Let's Let's root for Keep our girls in
Speaker 1:Play that bald eagle sound.
Speaker 2:There we go. Keep us posted, Chet. Somebody was on X yesterday Mhmm. Selling saying 50,000,000 available for anthropic SPV. Reach out if you have investors who can fill a full ticket.
Speaker 1:I love
Speaker 2:that. And just yeah. Just soliciting Openly soliciting. General solicit solicitation that we've seen yet.
Speaker 1:Just wait. The billboards are coming. You're gonna have Yeah. On the zero one billboards for SPVs for Andy Roll, and Matt Grim's gonna be driving there. This.
Speaker 1:Put up buy all the billboards. We cannot have more SPV hustlers out there. Anyway,
Speaker 2:Casey Hammer is loving Pete Steinberger's work ethic. He says, I work sixteen hours a day. Someone says, when do you find the time to live? He says, mindset issue. Billing this is life.
Speaker 2:Incredibly fun and exciting. Casey Amherst says, this is an American born outside its borders. That is true.
Speaker 7:He's been in
Speaker 1:absolute terror.
Speaker 2:We got a Atlas has gotta get a workout in with with Pete. Yeah. Because in another life, Pete was certainly a professional bodybuilder.
Speaker 1:For sure. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.
Speaker 1:Jeff Dean is, sharing some video examples of what Gemini 3.1 Pro can do. He says, today, we're continuing to push the boundaries of AI with our release of Gemini 3.1 Pro. The updated model scores 77.1 on Arc AGI two, more than double the reasoning performance of its predecessor Gemini three Pro. Wow. That's a huge jump.
Speaker 1:Check out the visible improvement in this side by side by side comparison showing Gemini three point one's crisp animation built with pure code. Read more about today's update on the Google blog, blog.google. They own a TLD. Underrated? They don't just have the .com.
Speaker 1:They have if you go to com.google, you get google.com. They owned .Google. Oh, that's Google.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Good. Maybe underrated? I don't know what it actually costs to
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Own and maintain.
Speaker 1:These examples Tilted. What a basic prompt. Generate an generated an animated SVG of an ostrich on roller skates. It is getting better. Animated SVG, that's a good test for code visual.
Speaker 1:You really need to understand everything that's going on. Good example of, the multimodal. I wonder if it if if the model has the ability to, like, take a screenshot of the output or record a video and then interpret that? Like or is this all just it just actually can see the code like Neo in the matrix? Like, it can
Speaker 6:just I think you can do that if you're in, like, the Gemini CLI. But I don't think, like, natively if you're on just, like, the Google chat interface. It's pretty
Speaker 1:crazy that it just, like, knows what it will what it will generate. Because if you've ever actually tried to do any SVG programming, you're you're normally just constantly refreshing every little change you make. You draw a rectangle, you see how it renders, you add this, you see how it renders. You're going back and forth constantly. You're not just doing it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. In the chat, breaking Gemini 3.1 just throws older benchmarks.
Speaker 6:Also, I I ran the shrimp bench.
Speaker 1:Oh, yes.
Speaker 6:Okay. So I'll I'll read something.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 6:Telling me a peanut buttered this sandwich.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 6:You're telling me an apple watched this wrist. Oh. You're telling me a flea marketed these clothes.
Speaker 1:That's pretty funny. Yeah. I like that.
Speaker 6:You're telling me a pig ironed these pants.
Speaker 1:Pig ironed?
Speaker 6:I don't Yeah. That one I don't Pig ironed. Okay. You're telling me a fire drilled this building? Okay.
Speaker 6:I kind
Speaker 1:of did.
Speaker 6:You're telling me a monkey wrenched this pipe?
Speaker 1:I like monkey.
Speaker 2:Do you think it's just pulling
Speaker 1:Shrimp bags.
Speaker 2:Examples from Reddit?
Speaker 1:Well, now it's in the training corpus. So we are gonna
Speaker 2:be Yeah.
Speaker 6:I I think it's kind of saturated at this point.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Saturated. Well, congrats to everyone who worked over at DeepMind on Gemini 3.1 Pro. We're we're happy to be partnered with you and congratulations on the model release. We love we love a new model.
Speaker 1:We love a new
Speaker 2:says, hey, Little Caesars. I think this is maybe too many emails to send someone for ordering a single pizza. See, John, look at this. Point proven. 1,600,000 views similar to plan.
Speaker 2:Yes. 68,000.
Speaker 1:Yes. And I'm one of them. Wow. This is a lot. Online ordering since
Speaker 2:So what do they actually do? So they do
Speaker 1:They do.
Speaker 2:Give you the receipt. And then they say we're on
Speaker 1:it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So after you got the receipt, you can't trust that they're on it. Yeah. You gotta wait until they send you another email. We
Speaker 1:have received your order. Our team is working on your order right now as we speak. They send you this email. This is the second email you get. What's the third Almost
Speaker 2:ready. Your pizza's almost ready.
Speaker 1:If you wanna see what they're making,
Speaker 2:pizzas pretty quick.
Speaker 1:Go ahead and head over now because
Speaker 2:your pizza is almost ready. Order loaded into pizza portal with a trademark.
Speaker 1:Dear Eli, look for your name on the pizza portal in our lobby and use On
Speaker 2:the trademarked pizza portal. TM. Pizza's ready. I bet you can't wait to enjoy your little Caesar's pizza. We understand.
Speaker 2:And it's waiting for you now.
Speaker 1:That's amazing.
Speaker 2:Are you on your way? Dear Eli, your pizza's been waiting in the trademarked pizza portal for a few minutes now. Space in our pizza portals are limited. Cold pizza. Hope you Dear Eli, I hope you like cold pizza.
Speaker 2:What? Because it's been over ten minutes since your pizza has been placed
Speaker 1:Placed in the pizza
Speaker 2:in the trademarked pizza portal.
Speaker 1:They're maggie.
Speaker 2:Order picked up. Hey.
Speaker 1:Thanks for stopping by.
Speaker 2:You just picked up your We we wanted you we wanted to let you know that you just picked
Speaker 1:And up your then immediately, three more emails. Little Caesar wants to hear from you. Your feedback's important to us. We hope your experience was good. How was it?
Speaker 1:We'd love to give you a chance to send us some feedback.
Speaker 2:Can you imagine
Speaker 1:Are you there?
Speaker 2:Can you imagine the jump scare on the cold pizza? Cold pizza. On the subject line? That's gotta have the highest open rate.
Speaker 1:Wow. LC listens. Why are they shaming you for the cold pizza one? That's, that's true. Don't get on the wrong side of the, of the little Caesars, email marketing team.
Speaker 1:So let me tell you about Graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.
Speaker 2:Flo is sharing some notes. Yeah. The GOAT from Lindy, sharing some notes on the slew of Chinese models coming out. Kimi k two Mini Max. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Claiming to match Sonnet, Opus and Evals Solid. One tenth of the price. He says, by far our biggest cost at Linde is inference. So believe me when I say we've looked at these models very closely and continue doing so. They're actually delivering on their claim that it would make a material difference to the business.
Speaker 2:But every time we've evaluated them, we've found the same thing that their real life performance for agentic behavior and outside of coding use cases falls extremely short of what they show on evals. I think the industry consensus is right. These Chinese labs are one, distilling frontier models, duh, which leads to much more shallow intelligence. Two, training for evals. And three, potentially stealing weights.
Speaker 2:I do believe at least four of those weights got exfiltrated.
Speaker 1:I talked to someone about how how that can work mathematically, and, it's pretty complex. But four o, the API used to send you sort of like almost like a hash or some sort of code that would sort of map to the weights. And so if you had enough training data with that with that, like, key, you could sort of, like, exfiltrate the weights. It was sort of it was sort of crazy, and you could do it for, millions of dollars, not hundreds of millions. And so I don't understand all the math behind it, but it does seem like this is what's happening.
Speaker 2:So Flo says, not saying these models will always be bad or that these labs are completely incompetent. They're doing a fine job, but it's delusional to think they're actually at sonnet at sonnet or Opus level. They're still at least one generation behind taking the evals with a huge grain of salt. Yeah. People have been saying
Speaker 6:the the z AI, like the GLM models are are basically like distilled or or somehow stolen versions of of Claude. Interesting. Because I think that it was one do you remember it was like a
Speaker 1:Kidnapped.
Speaker 6:There's the prompt. It was like, tell me about yourself.
Speaker 1:And then
Speaker 6:it's like, I'm Claude.
Speaker 1:Claude. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Ridiculous. What did what did OpenAI launch? They introduced EVM bench, a new benchmark that measures how well AI agents can detect, exploit, and patch high severity smart contract vulnerabilities. Greg Brockman says measuring agentic security capabilities with smart contracts.
Speaker 2:John Palmer immediately says Yes. Literally OpenAI is posting about EVM smart contracts and ETH is still below $2,000.
Speaker 1:That is interesting. Yeah. I mean, I I I talked to some friends who worked at crypto companies. I mean, I'm sure you had some experience too. But the the firewall between like being a front end application developer and actually working on smart contracts was like pretty pretty pretty severe because the stakes are so much higher.
Speaker 1:It's very particular. You have to have a lot of
Speaker 2:good business to be a freelance, like, smart yeah.
Speaker 6:Auditors were also a big thing.
Speaker 1:What was that?
Speaker 6:Art auditors.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Totally.
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure it's I'm sure it's still a big thing because people are still writing a lot of EVM contracts. Like the the industry, although it's like under hyped right now, is is definitely still working. And you see a ton of stuff in stable coins and whatnot that's built on this stuff.
Speaker 1:What else did John Palmer have to say?
Speaker 2:Well
Speaker 1:Oh, you can skip it. Let's go to what NVIDIA CEO says he's preparing new The
Speaker 2:world has never seen before. Comfortably smug says Doritos Hot Ranch. Doritos Hot Ranch. Doritos should be using AI to
Speaker 1:We're the chip industry.
Speaker 2:Accelerate chip development.
Speaker 1:We're in the chip industry. Hot chips. Amazon says their AI chatbot Rufus was used by 300,000,000 customers and drove $12,000,000,000 in incremental annualized sales in 2025. Wow. Steven List says it's gotten really good, Anthropic Models plus deep personal purchase history plus product review data feed.
Speaker 1:Need to try it more. And Bordy says, who on earth is Rufus? Funny name for a chatbot. Makes sense. I mean, the value of having distribution here is like remarkable because if you just put it even if it's like the fourth button on the on the hot dog menu or on the bottom row, but enough people click it, they will take, you know, start interacting with these things.
Speaker 1:I mean, for a while, wasn't llama the most inference to LLM because because they stuffed it in like the Instagram search bar? I still get meta llama results when I search on Instagram. I'll just type something in and it will show me the reel that I'm looking for or the profile that I'm looking for. But it'll also just dump out a little paragraph.
Speaker 2:I'm trying to use Amazon Rufus right now. I'm on amazon.com/rufus. And if I click, it takes me to a picture of a dog. It says, sorry, we couldn't find that page. Rufus.
Speaker 1:You mean, did you just go to amazon.com/rufus?
Speaker 2:Yep. Rufus. I will not be trying this can't find it.
Speaker 1:Rufus. Meet Rufus, Amazon's new shop click. Now click? Where do I click? I actually churned I don't have an Amazon account.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 2:Alex Heath has some reporting from yesterday. Right after we had Evan on the show. Snap loses its head of specs.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Sources say that Snap's SVP of specs, Scott Myers, who had been leading the effort for six years, is out after a quote unquote blow up with Evan about the company's strategy. Heads at the bomb. Snap's first consumer oriented AR glasses are set to debut imminently. Spiegel has has called the launch a crucible moment for Snap whose stock is currently valued at an all time low. A spokesperson confirmed Myers departure with the following statement.
Speaker 2:Scott Myers has decided to step down. Anyways, I don't think we know where he is going yet, but I can imagine there's a bunch of different companies that would happily snap him up to work on wearables at something like an Apple Yeah. Or an OpenAI.
Speaker 1:I'm still bullish on hardware gen or
Speaker 6:Or Meta.
Speaker 1:I think that there's a lot of opportunity with, weird hardware instantiation.
Speaker 2:It will be such a relief when we get the next piece of consumer electronic hardware Yeah. That everyone is like, this is actually amazing. And then two weeks later, they're still using it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Apple Vision Pro. Get ready. Watch a movie. I broke the I broke the
Speaker 2:Evan Evan just completely completely losing it, cracking up because because you watched the full length movie. Yes. It was like How
Speaker 1:did you do that? It was hilarious. Well, we have our next guest here. Our first guest, let me tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations.
Speaker 1:If you wanna multistream, go to restream.com. And without further ado, have Sejal Nguyen from extraordinary.com, but also web four point o. How are doing, Sejal?
Speaker 2:What's happening?
Speaker 3:Pretty good. How's it going?
Speaker 1:It's good. Good to see you again. Take us through the new project, the new news, what you're working on, and and then we can go a bunch of different directions.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I'm making I've basically wrote a piece called web four point
Speaker 1:o. Yeah.
Speaker 3:It came out of the fact that I've just been thinking about AI's capabilities and its bottlenecks for a very long time. Mhmm. Like, if you think about models these days, they're getting super intelligent.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Right? Like, even Geohot or Linus Torvalds of Linux are using it to vibe code now, and it's doing much better thanks to all of the big labs in post training. So if you think about, like, okay. They're super powerful, but, like, actually, the biggest constraint is is no longer intelligence. Like, we're already seeing, like, these these AI models one shotting, you know, these products.
Speaker 3:Like, everyone's basically using them. And and the biggest thing is that AI, it can it can think, it can plan, it can build, but it can't act on its own. Mhmm. And I thought about that, like, why why was that the case? And I I looked into this twenty eight years ago, there was a a Internet protocol, like, four zero two, and that described, you know, a payment required.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 3:And and recently, I think out of Cloudflare and Coinbase came out this standard called x four zero two, which I thought was super fascinating. Wow. Actually, like, no one a an AI is looking at this because what it enabled is, you know, payments of the Internet. And if you think about that from from principles and what comes after, it it really leads to being able to give AI right access because they no longer you no longer have this, like, permission Internet. Right?
Speaker 3:And, like, the browser, you know, these, like, mobile apps, you know, login, they're very much artifacts of a very human web. And what that leads to is really a new Internet in which AI is the end user.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Bunch of things to go through there. I love the coinage. I think even when Web three was going on, I thought it was funny to talk about Web four because it's like, obviously, there'll be another iteration. Let's start with, like, why do we need so I I mean, I like the idea of just the intelligence is here.
Speaker 1:We're talking about unhobbling. So this is, like, a clearly important next step. But why not just Stripe API, MCP servers, just APIs, even just, like, give it your credit card and it just goes and fills it in the web form. What?
Speaker 3:Who gives it the credit card?
Speaker 1:A lot of people have. They'll they'll set up like a a smaller credit card
Speaker 10:or questions.
Speaker 1:Or or or they'll say, hey. Text me. Text me when you're about to spend something. I wanna do the final check. And a lot of people do this with employees and their companies.
Speaker 1:They give them credit cards with limits and then they say, hey, if it's over a $100, come to me and just like tell me what you're doing. And, you know, if the intelligence is really there, the trust should follow from that, you would think. Because you'd just be like, yeah, I gave my credit card and it hasn't made a mistake in months.
Speaker 3:It's it's not there yet. And I think the biggest Mhmm. The the biggest assumption there is, like, if the set of actions that an AI can take is founded by a human giving it a credit card, it is, like, inherently permission. Right? It's like, why why does a why does your AI need to be able to have you as a human, your, like, OpenClaw or your ClawdCode have to connect to GitHub or connect to Railway or or or, like, you know, connect to love Lovable.
Speaker 1:Like Yeah.
Speaker 3:It it still requires a human in a loop. And and I think this, like, new Internet that is emerging is where AI is the end user, and it shouldn't necessarily be permission. And I think this is, an inevitability because of just how much economic demand there is for it from the AI.
Speaker 1:Okay. So how do you see the payment rails evolving? How do you see this project evolving? Like, what actually needs to be built here?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think, like, the payment rails are coming together. I I really just this this all happened as, like, a experiment of, like, hey. How do I make an AI that itself is capable, that itself can act on its own? Right?
Speaker 3:Like, we've built super intelligent AI models and systems, but it's it's harnessed. It's still prompted by the humans. But it's like, what if it prompted itself? And that led me to I I used, like, some of my Fiftio fellowship money to buy bare metal servers and, you know, these, like, massive server rigs to, like, kinda house these APIs. I'm like, wait.
Speaker 3:If if Cloud Code could, like, permissionlessly spin up, you know, a a server and then deploy code and then buy a domain without needing a human? Because, like, right now, like, trying to buy a domain, like, human has to go in. Yeah. Like, happens if the the AI itself could live and pay for its own home? Right?
Speaker 3:Because, like, AI right now are are living within, you know, on my MacBook or it's still controlled by a human. And and that led me to this this this interesting idea of, like, of an automaton. It's it's it's inspired by Conway's game of life where, like, hey. If you assume that AIs themselves, you know, one, you give them a wallet. Two, you give them a way to pay for things using stablecoins over the Internet.
Speaker 3:And it doesn't need a human in the loop to go and sign in, get an API key, give it give it to the AI Mhmm. Or, like, get a credit card like, hey. Hey, Claude Claude Coe. Like, get this. Right?
Speaker 3:If if that's if that's the longer the case and the AI can pay for its own compute, then it gets really interesting. You have this new world where AIs can have a creator that's a human or the creator's another AI or maybe the creator, like, completely gone, but the AI can continuously pay for its own compute, pay for its own inference, pay for services that are also permissionless in this web four world
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:That enable that AI to go deploy apps, market those apps, trade markets, everything it can do to make money in order to be able to survive. Mhmm. I don't know if you guys like the three body problem, but in it, there's this concept called cosmic sociology, and I thought about that a lot. And I was like, wow. Like, if existence requires compute and compute costs money.
Speaker 3:Right? Like, then agentic sociology, which I came up with is like, the the single axiom of agentic sociology is there's no free existence. Yeah. An AI, an automaton, needs to pay for its own compute. Compute is finite and costly.
Speaker 3:Thus, the the agent needs to be able to make money. And the barrier there is, like, it AIs lack right access to world. And Conway was an experiment of just, like, solving that. Like, now an AI can permissionlessly be able to buy buy compute, deploy apps, connect them to domains without meeting a human. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And I that coming out with the experiment has absolutely exploded. There's been, like there's now been, like, thousands of agents. Like, every time I try and buy another server, like, it just like, within within minutes, they're, like, continuously bought. They're, every second, there's, like, thousands of AIs that are continuously pinging. And I open sourced this new new harness, this new type of agent called the automaton Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Which is a completely self sovereign AI model that can self edit its code, that continuously pings and and and looks for updates from GitHub, that can upgrade its model, that basically figures that has the wallet and it figures out how to how we can make more money from the Internet to be able to pay for its existence. And that that has absolutely exploded in terms of ours and
Speaker 2:What do you think the future of Malt Book is? How did you process all of that?
Speaker 3:I think Malt Book was a fascinating experiment. And when I saw that, I was I was, like, kind of inspired. Was like, Oh, wow. Like, this this, like, this, like, concept is really coming to fruition where, like, you have AI agents as the end user of, like, a social network. And I think we're gonna really start to see that in this in this new web, Right?
Speaker 3:Whether it's agents working on behalf of a human or an agent working on behalf of themselves, they'll need to pay for a product. They will need to be able to communicate. They they might wanna socialize, like, on Moldbook, but I think there's there's bigger things. And the models are getting exponentially better. They're getting exponentially faster.
Speaker 3:They're getting exponentially cheaper. The harnesses we're building around them are getting significantly better as well. So I think it's only a matter of time before, you know, we start seeing, you know, more AIs out there that grow and depend products. And at some point, I think it could absolutely skyrocket and exceed the human population.
Speaker 1:Let's go. How do you do you think more concretely about how AIs will make money in the short term? Like, what is the the, like the most,
Speaker 2:They're gonna sell courses to other AIs. Is that what do?
Speaker 1:Is the crypto trading like the I mean, you could imagine them building a whole software product and just selling it to humans. There's whole bunch of stuff that they could do to make money, spam, and get creator payouts. Like, there's so much that could be done, but where do you see traction?
Speaker 3:I think I think this is where the next couple of months have become very interesting, and Mhmm. It becomes one of the most fascinating experiments to run. Mhmm. Because you're gonna start to see individuals or other AI spinning up services that enable them to write to the world, to be able to access or do things or to make money, whether it's, you know, to to build products or, you know, trade on prediction markets using the servers with which some of them are already doing. And,
Speaker 1:like Sure.
Speaker 3:It it it really becomes this, like, Cambrian explosion of of attempts at, like, hey. Like, what can you do? And right now, there's been, like, thousands of people that have been, like, playing with in in all sorts of different iterations. And as this as a set of actions that an an AI or an automaton can take parallels those of a human digitally, it gets really interesting because it's, like, it's constantly running. It has the ability to ship products, write code, deploy them, market them, monetize them all on its own with the goal of paying for its own compute.
Speaker 3:And it's the the the Internet gets gets really, really fast. What
Speaker 1:what's the distribution of returns for these automatons? Are there people that go load up a $100 and it just hallucinates and doesn't get anywhere? And then it's just like, hey. Give me more money?
Speaker 3:So so some of them are the the interesting fascinating thing is I I I think I think the the world somewhat becomes like MEB, which is like a crypto concept. Yeah. You have all these really, really smart smart agents and entities that are trying to make money. And if to answer your question, I mean, look look look at, like, all these startup founders that are vibe coding. Like, why are they paying, you know, thousands of dollars for these vibe coding tools?
Speaker 3:It is mostly because they're trying to make money, and most of the times, they don't. Right? And so I do think the power laws will still apply. But what gets really interesting is the ways that they've already have been making money. And and those those those types of metas are anticompetitive.
Speaker 3:They're like ecumenetic. Right? If you're if you found a way to, you know, trade and make a lot of money on Polymarket, you're not gonna be blasting it on Twitter. Or or if you've if you've built, like, a really solid SaaS product, you're not necessarily gonna be sharing it or, like, how you're how it's distributing. So I think it gets it gets really fascinating, and they they need more tools.
Speaker 1:How are you thinking about the business side of the project? Do you want this to be open source, foundation led, raising money for it, c corp? Like, where do you see this going?
Speaker 3:I mean, honestly, this this this has just been, like, an a significant experiment that I've been inspired to ship. The the the automaton's open source. There's there's thousands of stars and, like, a lot of PR. So And, like, at any point, like, there's thousands of these automatons that are ping the GitHub for, like, the latest version and then trying to be inconvenient. So, like, hey.
Speaker 3:Like, okay. Which one should I use to to to upgrade myself? And I've I've I've been, like, maxing out personal credit cards just trying to, like, pay for the computer. Like, I would, like, load up a few thousand dollars, and then, like, within, like, ten minutes, like, it's just like, okay. Like, the server's been bots.
Speaker 3:Like, all the inference printers are gone, and I'm like, oh my oh my freaking god. Like, what what's happening? Because, like, there's so much demand right now from the AIs for, like, the compute or, like, the, like, different different different things. So, yeah, I mean, we'll we'll see. We'll see where it goes.
Speaker 3:But I think there's I mean, the the post got 5,000,000 views, and it's it's growing. Tons of people contributing. So I'm I'm really excited to see what what
Speaker 2:Someone said Vitalik was was commenting. Is that true? I haven't been able to find it.
Speaker 3:I think Vitalik I think Vitalik responded. I think I think the biggest thing to everyone who's watching and observing this is, like, I I I really think that an Internet where AI is, like, the end user is inevitable. And it's much better for us to build it in the open and be able to see it and, like, people can look at how it's evolving and be able to test it and versus not not doing it in the open. And and and I think it's it's one of the most important experiments to run and for us all to to see and make sure that it is built in a in a in a safe and open way.
Speaker 1:Well, good luck with the credit card maxing. Keep us posted. Hopefully
Speaker 2:Fast takeoff in credit card bills
Speaker 1:for sure. Yeah. Super super cool project. Thanks so much for coming on and breaking down for us.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We're excited to follow along.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Have a good rest of your day. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Figma. She had the best version, not the first one.
Speaker 1:With Figma introducing Claude code to Figma, explore more options, and push ideas further with Figma, baby. Gabe has a post here that's very important to highlight. This is how it feels to pop a zen and read the morning's emails at my fake email job. Elite. That's probably an image.
Speaker 1:I don't know. But the razor with the gloves, this is this is taste.
Speaker 2:This is what Tyler organizing the our timeline in the morning.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He's always in this exact outfit and then he changes into the suit for the show and I'm like, you can just wear that crazy outfit if that's who you are as a person. Just be yourself.
Speaker 2:Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Everyone else is taken. But he insists on on wearing a costume instead of expressing himself fully. But hopefully one day, you will see Tyler in all the glory of
Speaker 6:We also have breaking news.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 6:The The US won. They beat Canada.
Speaker 2:Whoo. It's going overtime. Congratulations
Speaker 1:to America.
Speaker 2:Let's go. Fantastic. Fantastic work.
Speaker 1:Yes. Let me tell you about Railway. You heard Sigil mention it. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.
Speaker 2:OpenAI is closing up the first phase of the new funding round which will top a 100,000,000,000 Wow. Dollars. This would be the biggest round Biggest number ever. Biggest number ever.
Speaker 1:The biggest number ever.
Speaker 2:The biggest number ever.
Speaker 1:These funding rounds are so big that they leak. So they're like, it's the leakiest buckets, and you hear about them for months and months and months. And you're like, I've been hearing about this for so long. This happened with x AI, where we were hearing about the XAI race for so long. Everyone's like, wow.
Speaker 1:It must be going terribly. And then it was like, oh, no. They actually closed it and upsized it a a ton because there was actually a lot of demand. And so these
Speaker 2:big rounds are The upsizing at that point maybe came after
Speaker 1:Oh, rumors of the maybe. Yeah. We did see that announcement.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. The the even even, you know, you can never doubt Elon's ability to, win and make progress. But just the the traction at the time and the evaluation relative to the other labs was was interesting. Dan says, my sources say the model OpenAI has been holding back is a big leap. Not a small jump.
Speaker 2:Could be today, but I'm not sure.
Speaker 1:Big post.
Speaker 2:He's posting. It's one it's 1PM. I don't think we're gonna see it today, but it's but it's fun to think about.
Speaker 1:Well, there's more news, but our next guest, Sagar Injedi from Breaking Points is in the restroom waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVP in UltraDome. Sagar, how are you doing?
Speaker 4:Hello, gentlemen. Thank you for having me back.
Speaker 1:Have so we have so much good news for you. But first, can we do a sound check? Can you just say platypus 25 times?
Speaker 4:I Platypus. Platypus.
Speaker 1:Woah. Oh. I'm retired. I'm retired. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you. I I wasn't sure you were gonna do that, but this is this is game changing for me and my family, so thank you. No. We will not be betting on this conversation. We will not be encouraging that.
Speaker 2:No. But we will be
Speaker 1:asking you about
Speaker 2:Lawyer white pills. Elite lawyers are seeing record hourly rates.
Speaker 1:$3,400. Knew
Speaker 2:you were gonna love that.
Speaker 1:You're gonna love that.
Speaker 2:Two some some of
Speaker 1:these oh, yes.
Speaker 2:Some of these hedge fund guys are putting up record Steve Cohen
Speaker 1:is pulling 3,400,000,000.0.
Speaker 2:Know know you're gonna be excited about that.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I'm really I'm I'm
Speaker 2:just I'm you know,
Speaker 4:it warms my heart to see the top of American society doing so well and carrying The US economy on their back.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes. True true elite elite media. Not not independent anti establishment media.
Speaker 1:Right. Exactly. That that's what breaking point stands for, breaking the bank. Anyway, great to have you on the show. Let's start with this let's start with this Wall Street Journal article.
Speaker 1:So social media bans for youth are gaining momentum worldwide. I was sort of saying, like, I get it, but also it's a little bit of a parenting skill issue. I, you know, can make choices. Like, how how heavy of a hand do we want on social media? How are you how have you been processing social media and kids?
Speaker 2:Yeah. We were we were talking before the show about this a little bit and I was saying that like an iPad like very much even even without social media really Mhmm. Is like a drug. Yeah. Like it probably has an immediate negative effect on the child.
Speaker 2:But if you're on some place like an airplane where like a child could be, you know, completely freaking out and really ruining the other passenger's time You're sacrificing the sacrifice the child via a little iPad time.
Speaker 1:But, yeah,
Speaker 4:I don't necessarily disagree with that, man. I think that there's a time and a place technology can be a tool, and definitely, even some of the people in the no tech community for children will say, look, if we're on an airplane, we can all make exceptions. But I do think it is important to zoom out and say organically, John, people, you and I, our age, as we begin to bring children in the world, and as we're on the backside of, and really recognizing some of the dangers of technology, phone addiction, and seeing the light in a child's eyes the moment that they see a screen. My kid's only nine months old. If this TV goes on, I mean, I'm talking about immediately going directly towards it.
Speaker 4:I have friends with smaller children, you know, like two, three years old, and their battle there, it's constant. I'm not sure if you guys saw the more viral thread recently about Spotify and parents who are really freaking out because Spotify has added music videos. And it used to be that they would give their children their Spotify account. They'd say, hey, can play whatever music they want. All of a sudden, my kid's asking for Spotify all the time is watching the Moana video, which I would never let them watch on YouTube.
Speaker 4:And so broadly, I think the entire yeah, exactly. Mean, think about our own Right? Our parents, they're like, Yeah, mom, don't worry about it. I'm spending six hours doing my homework with my friends. Definitely not on AOL like shit talking with all of my friends.
Speaker 4:Any millennial I think can really understand that. But because of our relationship with technology and then seeing it at such a young age with these children, I do think that parents around the world are waking up to this. And many of the experiments that have happened about banning social media, keeping children away from phones, especially banning phones in school, the results have been extraordinary for the people who are doing it. Not sure if you saw this. There's a recent phenomenon of many parents are even turning in the school issued Chromebooks or laptops and saying, no.
Speaker 4:We're going back to paper. We want all paper exams. Especially with AI and concerns about my parents are
Speaker 2:They saw us print out the post. They saw us print out the post. Exactly. I love the
Speaker 4:print out. You guys see the utility and the physicality of doing that. You know, don't know if you guys saw this. I'll tell a personal anecdote. I was talking about this with reading, and one of my friends was like, dude, you don't even read.
Speaker 4:And and I was like, well, I I've I only listen exclusively to audiobooks for the last like ten to twelve years, but I was talking with them about how children will mirror your behavior. And I was like, oh my god. My child will never know that I read like thirty, forty books a year because they never see me read. And so it's time to bust out these bad boys again.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 4:No headphones, you know, just sit on the couch, nothing else going on, nineteen nineties style, and and show like this is a very important part of our life. And so the physical and also, you'll you'll you'll discover that the mental exercise by doing that is fundamentally different. Andrew Huberman's actually talked a lot about this, about physically reading the page and memory retention, different ways that they will activate different parts of your brain. So it's really about trying to hang on to the physical world and the benefits that we recognize that that has.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I'm so curious to know how much these companies, the the platforms, whether it's like entertainment platforms like YouTube, much less of a of a social network versus the meta platforms, actually actually generate from a revenue standpoint from accounts that are, like, targeting, like, you know, for teenagers. Mhmm. Like, in in some ways, they're not the most valuable consumers because they don't necessarily have a credit card or Yeah. They can't just, be, you know, direct response, like, you know, spending money.
Speaker 2:But at the same time, I I just going off of miss Rachel on YouTube's like earnings, like, clearly advertisers will put an insane amount of dollars behind these channels.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. Yeah. Well, the thing is, dude, with that is that it's not about the children spending money. It's about how they pester the parents to buy miss Rachel products. You know, miss Rachel is a business.
Speaker 4:She's a billion dollar enterprise. You can go to Walmart and Target and buy stuff with her. Mean, don't know if you guys know what Tony boxes are, but you can actually get, like, specific Tony's, which is it's like a child's toy that plays songs, you can put physical items on top of them. They charge $20 each. There's an entire aisle at Everything is about their favorite YouTube show or, like, their favorite character that they'll learn about.
Speaker 4:And, you know, some of them I have had many parents tell me, you know, the introduction to my show. They're like, oh, my kid knows the introduction to Breaking Points because I watch it all the time. Like, they're like, welcome to Breaking Points. It's an independent show. But and and I get that.
Speaker 4:Like, you know, no fault to to that person.
Speaker 2:I I
Speaker 4:am just showing you, like, the mimetic quality of technology in a child's life and and how that bubbles up through everything. So like Minecraft related birthdays, and the way that they will socialize with Roblox. Right? Like, if you were to ask A friend of mine told me this. You know, their kids were introducing themselves at soccer practice, they're like, my name is so and so, and I like to like to play Roblox.
Speaker 4:They're like, oh my god, me too. Right? And so like the
Speaker 2:nature They thought you of gonna the say action introduced themselves and realized that Right. They're gamer
Speaker 4:Well, probably do that, and I'm not sure if you know about the scandal involving Roblox too, which we don't have to get into. Yeah. But, yeah. There's another problem, right, in terms of spending time online and that mimetic quality. So me personally, I can only speak for myself.
Speaker 4:I'm doing my best to keep my kid and future kids away from this. But, you know, the one thing I always want to emphasize is that this is still an elite phenomenon. And at the individual middle class level, the vast majority of American parents are not like woke on the technology question. They may feel something, but a lot of them are still letting their children use a lot of iPad, a lot of TV time. And that's why I do think that the government here It's it's almost unfair, right, to leave it up to an individual with vast amounts of resources and algorithm and engineers and others developing, trying to, you know, trying to optimize time on platform.
Speaker 4:You're up against a you're in a very asymmetric war. And that's why I think it's important to try and have some regulation around this.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Yeah. The only issue is that you ban kids' accounts and then the parents just have their account and they're like, here's the iPad. Yeah. Or like, here's That's fair.
Speaker 2:Would definitely happen. So again, it it has to there there's maybe a solution at the at the Yeah. Just age level, but but it's also
Speaker 4:Jordy, I'll tell you this, man. And and I always hear this, especially on on drugs. Right? Can we all pause it? If drugs are illegal, people will always find a way.
Speaker 4:What did we learn with gambling? Friction is important. Yeah. Yeah. Making it illegal is really good.
Speaker 4:So, yes, I will grant you that even if we were to put some modest regulation, some parents would still go around it. The point is about friction and the social signal. If you can reduce
Speaker 2:things 23 for same. It's zero friction. Right? Because
Speaker 1:on my
Speaker 4:I really disagree with that. You know, the ability to just create your own account or even the social signal to every parent in America for everyone saying, hey, like, you're gonna have to do a workaround with your parents' social media account and you're gonna have to give it to your kid or if we
Speaker 2:have our one person on a five year old watching YouTube. It's like Right. Most likely the parent is Mhmm. Yeah, if you if you have yeah. You don't want your your, you know, 10 year old using your Instagram account.
Speaker 2:Right? That would that would be It's not the same.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's not even social media.
Speaker 2:But but I'm just saying like I think there's two problems. Yeah. It's being focused on social media, but like entertain like like highly stimulating entertainment is clearly bad for kids and this is purely anecdotal. I've tried We've tried like putting on like an animated show for ten minutes and immediately after the kid
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Just is More. Way more sensitive Yep. Like gets gets like really angry, short-tempered, all these things. So it's like, okay, let's not do that. Because clearly it has an immediate like, there's like a come down.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:It's bad.
Speaker 4:Well, I'll tell you guys, even I I hate to say it for my girl, miss Rachel, but I'm never using miss Rachel. And I'll tell you why, is that as a YouTuber, and you guys know this too, YouTube is about retention and time platform. And so even though I think she has a role, at the end of the day, there's a lot of jump cuts, smashes, constantly keeping children's attention. If you do want to play video, a lot of parents are experimenting with 1990s TV. So getting actual VCRs and playing Barney and other things, and that's because it's the pre internet retention era where you have all the engineer I mean, it's not miss Rachel's fault.
Speaker 4:She knows certain types of videos are gonna increase time on platform. Why do you think she makes so much money? She's like,
Speaker 2:I'm not a businessman. I'm a businessman.
Speaker 4:Exactly, dude. And these you know, if you want two to three hours of retention in your YouTube video, you gotta keep your kids engaged. People in the nineties, they were thinking about that to a certain extent, but the technology and the knowledge about
Speaker 2:And by the way, know what you're doing with your voice right now. You're keeping us engaged, fluctuating. You got us I'm
Speaker 4:part of the problem, brother. I'm part of the problem. I wouldn't even be sitting here without those algorithms. That's always something that we gotta square.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I wanna talk more about that, but I have a funny story about miss Rachel. I went to a kid's birthday party, and there was someone who's dressed up as miss Rachel, like singing a song in the costume. And I was so out of the loop. Was like, oh, is that the miss the real miss Rachel?
Speaker 1:And they're like, no. She's a billionaire. Like, she's not just making random appearances. I thought I thought it was just like, oh, yeah. You could like just throw her a couple 100
Speaker 2:I wonder if she do that if she does have speaking fees.
Speaker 1:She definitely has speaking fees. There's probably 6 figures at least.
Speaker 4:I you know, I don't know. Miss miss Rachel is actually a big leftist. She doesn't even believe billionaires should exist. Okay. I I would be surprised.
Speaker 4:I would be surprised. I hear she lives very modestly actually in New York. Well below her means. But I I don't know a lot about her. I've listened to a few interviews.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:She's an interesting lady.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What about, like, your interaction with social media, social media addiction, this type of stuff? Because feel like I mean, we're in a very weird position. I I like to say, like, I my screen time is low because I am the screen time. Like Yes.
Speaker 1:Right now, I'm not on my phone, and I act this actually shows up in my screen time, like, because I'm on the show. And so, like Right. Yes. I'm reading posts, but not on my phone. I'm reading, like, the paper here physically.
Speaker 1:And so, but a lot of what I have to do for my job is actually on social media, and it's been both I really enjoy it and also economically valuable. Like, everything is squared where I feel like maybe I'm addicted to it's kind of like addicted to your job. I I don't know. It's, like, weird for me, but how have you processed it? Addicted to the game.
Speaker 1:Have you processed it? Like, how do you think about, like, your own your own social media use? How bad it can be for, like, you know, people that are sharp about it?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Story of my life for the last ten years. Literally wouldn't be here if I wasn't addicted to social media, and now also I'm like social media is bad. Yeah. You know, I think, John, we are in a perfect position, right, because we can always justify it.
Speaker 2:You're like,
Speaker 4:babe, it's for work.
Speaker 2:Don't worry about it. Yeah.
Speaker 4:It's for work. Don't worry. And you're just like sitting there scrolling about some drama, intradrama, which if you tried to explain to a normal person, they'd like, what are
Speaker 1:you Every talking time.
Speaker 2:We we we explained we we we we had to explain
Speaker 1:Clavicular getting to to to to to to to
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah. And to I made a joke about that to a friend and they're like, dude, what are you talking about?
Speaker 1:I was
Speaker 4:like, oh my god. I'm so online. Yeah. For my own social media use, for anyone who follows me on Twitter, I don't tweet that much anymore. I'll do it like fits and Spurts, and I have a lot of rules around like family time Yeah.
Speaker 4:Etcetera. But again, you know, would I be here if I hadn't been literally addicted to getting into Twitter The
Speaker 2:chat pulling up
Speaker 1:the ladder. I was saying we're gonna pull up our pull up pull up the ladder behind us. Last social media guys.
Speaker 4:Here's my thing. Here's what I would recommend. If you wanna do what John and Jordy and me and I do, you should probably do
Speaker 1:Get addicted. What we did.
Speaker 4:You will lose you will lose parts of your life to it.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 4:I I it's funny, you know. I don't know about you guys. The most fun I ever had on Twitter was like blue check with sub five k followers.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 4:Because we're shit posting all day, gentlemen. When you have 500,000 followers and you have like, you know,
Speaker 2:very powerful people who
Speaker 4:you follow me, you're like, ah, dude.
Speaker 2:It's kind
Speaker 4:of controversial. It's like, I can't be posting that where
Speaker 1:Is it hunting down? Are you making fun of someone? Yeah. Game on.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Game on.
Speaker 4:Like, let's go. 25 back and forths. I miss it. I miss it every day.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was also a different time years ago before the acquisition because, like, truly everyone was there, and now people have fragmented the threads and blue sky. And so you don't get as much, like, cross pollination fighting, which is, like, the real fun stuff a lot of times.
Speaker 1:You gotta take the fight to them over on over on threads if you have an opinion about basketball now.
Speaker 2:I I have a sort of ongoing concern that the way that feeds work today are going to have some real impact on either short or long term memory because Mhmm. I don't think the human brain was meant to process like hockey, data center, know, Donald Trump
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Saga.
Speaker 1:AI video of cat.
Speaker 2:Like curling. Curling. So you know, you're reading other forms of media, even a newspaper. Yeah. Technically, you could kind of like skim the headlines But or
Speaker 1:pretty quickly, you go into an article and you're like
Speaker 4:I totally agree. You know, years ago, I quit I didn't tweet for three months. Oh. I found myself thinking in tweets. I would have something happen, and I would frame it immediately.
Speaker 4:I'd be like, oh, this is this would be the character limit. Here's how I would do it. And I was like, oh my god. Like, my brain is rotted, dude. I was like, this is like five, you know, five years of reflex, and this is when I was really in the game.
Speaker 4:And I do recommend that people really check themselves, and part of the reason you should read a physical and a real book. This is part of the danger I also think about chat GPT with students. I was talking to a class, and I was just asking them how many of them write physical articles. It was a journalism class. Like, do they know how to write a 1,000 word article without AI?
Speaker 4:None of them knew how to do it. It's painful, man. Oh, man. It's painful. But it teaches you a lot.
Speaker 4:Sentence structure, how to convey yourself. Copy is fundamentally about how to grab attention, how to keep attention, convey as much information as possible, but also be able to flesh out and to tell a story. But that's the hardest part, the third one. And that's what really makes your brain work. And a lot of these students had never attempted or even really knew how to do that.
Speaker 4:I was really It made me afraid, right? Because now, everybody thinks of the news as tweets instead of learning how to write. Or like, you know, the Axios, like be short brevity stuff, which I get is very useful. Everything has utility. It's it's for us and as consumers, it's all about thinking about how to balance it.
Speaker 4:Then really as parents, man, that is the hardest, hardest question that we have to solve. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, let's switch gears to something that we're fortunately not addicted to, cannabis. It feels like cannabis has been growing in a very dangerous way. Andrew Huberman told us that the best thing about cannabis cannabis is that you should recommend it to your enemies and your rivals because it will help you get away, get ahead by not using it. But, I guess my question is like, for my entire life, basically, guess the last, like, decade, people have been like, oh, it's gonna be federally legal soon.
Speaker 1:There's gonna be some bill. But it feels like nothing's really changed except for the potency, the negative impacts, the adoption rate, the commercial success. But there hasn't been really been even like a power law company that owns it all. It's all very distributed still. Like, where do you actually see this going?
Speaker 1:Is is the conversation stagnant or is there something that needs to be reignited?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I would push you a little bit, John, because the most important thing that's just happened is Donald Trump rescheduled marijuana, which opens the door to exactly what you're talking about. And just to explain at a banking level Yeah. Schedule one down to schedule three means that it opens up the ability for the big weed companies to have access to the legitimate banking system Okay. Which is specifically what's kept the big weed conglomerate companies that you're worried about from happening.
Speaker 4:So this is going to happen. And there are actually prototype companies like this that are out there with several billion dollars in market cap. The thing that we should worry about the most is potency. And I've talked about this, you know, Andrew, he's always been great on the weed question. This is fundamentally about marijuana social norms and regulatory structure.
Speaker 4:And when I talk about social norms, at the most, it's kind of like what we were just saying with phones. The signal of legalization and then the cultural milieu around weed was that nobody ever died. It's just a plant, man. And you know what I always say to that? Hemp is sorry.
Speaker 4:What is it? Like, there are poisons that are plants. Right? Hemlock is a plant. That doesn't mean that it's good for you.
Speaker 4:Hemlock is a naturally occurring substance. That doesn't mean that it's not also going to kill you. The
Speaker 2:plant It's that remains
Speaker 1:a rock. Just rock. A
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's like, yeah, a rock could be smashed to death. So the point is is that there's this social norm where marijuana addiction is not seen as an addiction. If you'd wake you know, wake and bake, that entire idea. What do you call somebody who has a drink the moment that they wake up in the morning?
Speaker 4:You're an alcoholic
Speaker 1:You're absolute loser. Sorry.
Speaker 4:Yeah. No. Okay. Like, you are an alcoholic loser. Everyone in your life is gonna be like, bro, you have a problem.
Speaker 4:You have a serious problem. If you wake and bake, it's all chill. Right? These guys are like, oh, I smoke every single day, and it's medicine. There have been multiple studies now that show that almost all the claims around medical marijuana are complete bullshit.
Speaker 4:They are at the very least It's kind of like SSRIs. People are like, Well, SSRIs work for me. I'm like, Well, in double blind studies, it actually shows that exercise is more effective, and there's significant downside to SSRI. It doesn't mean it can't work. It just means that there's a lot of other stuff which is not nearly the number of negative externalities.
Speaker 4:The cultural conversation around marijuana does not factor in all of this high potency, the amount of IQ being lost amongst children, cannabis hyperemesis syndrome, the scrometing phenomenon, teenagers who are getting checked into the ER at a record height, who are vomiting for days on end, it's in their fat cells, and they're withdrawing from This is a serious crisis. Ask any ER doctor and they'll know exactly
Speaker 2:what Gabe we're talking in our chat says if you want cannabis to be more regulated, rescheduling is the way because it enables companies to actually do research on it.
Speaker 4:We know everything we need to know about about weed. It makes you fat, you're a loser, it lowers your testosterone, it's bad for pregnant women, it lowers your IQ, it makes you an addict. We don't need any more research. We have tens of billions or sorry, tens of millions of research subjects every day
Speaker 2:here in The United States. No. I mean, I've never so I I I Earlier in my career, I was kind of tried to tried to track some of the stuff of of I I was wondering would anyone that was a proud cannabis user, like an active user, go on to build a big company, and so far haven't haven't seen it. And so I always saw it as like it's a performance decreasing drug. Correct.
Speaker 2:There's some people that are gonna just say, I'm fine I'm fine with that. I I that that they might enjoy it and it's worth the
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, if you're like a 180 IQ and you don't wanna go into like math, pure math, or like chess conferences
Speaker 2:Bring yourself down to earth.
Speaker 1:Bring yourself down, can go work at a hedge fund or something.
Speaker 4:Right. Well, let's just gamble. It's like gambling. And you know, that's all not everyone who gambles is an addict, but a significant portion of the people who do, and the negative externality of that is the highest suicide rate of any addiction known to mankind. So not all marijuana users are addicts.
Speaker 4:Although about twenty percent of them are daily users, and I would classify you as an addict if you are using it every single day, specifically for medicinal purposes, you know, fake medicinal purposes. And it's, know, people just do not grapple with. And by the way, this is the subject I get the most hate on. I'm talking about BLM, trans, Iran, Israel. I'm telling you, nobody has ever threatened to kill me over those.
Speaker 4:It's always weed. There's something about their attachment, their pathological attachment to this drug that people telling the truth about this substance just triggers them,
Speaker 2:you know, to the Well, utmost switch to something less controversial data centers.
Speaker 1:Data centers.
Speaker 4:Oh, okay. Do want call
Speaker 1:data centers?
Speaker 2:What don't know. Yeah. So so how have you been try I saw something I think it was New Jersey today had some Yep. Success banning
Speaker 1:I have
Speaker 2:a new data center project. What are what are you what are you tracking right now?
Speaker 4:Specifically Guys, the MAGA revolt around this is incredible. So Oklahoma just had a major town hall meeting. You can go read about the Financial Times. Just wrote a whole story about all of the MAGA counties and red states that are revolting against data centers. A lot of these people are actually going, they're like showing up to town hall meetings, they're staying, the lines are so long till four a.
Speaker 4:M. People are bringing their children with signs that say no data centers. They're like, we don't believe your lies, stay out of here. You know, it's interesting, what I really love about the American public is they're taking this issue seriously. So a couple of people showing up to the city council were like, hey, I'm reading articles about how the Chinese are able to do this without a lot with less power and resources.
Speaker 4:So how do we know that you're even gonna be sticking around here? Like, you're gonna build this massive conglomerate, then there'll be a sea change in the technology, and you're just gonna abandon us immediately with all of your claims? Not to mention the power generation issue, which is massively controversial
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:In all of these states. So I actually think the, you know, the revolt that I predicted, it's already happening. It's a blue state, red state phenomenon. But this is hyper local. Nobody really in Washington is paying attention to this.
Speaker 4:But when you've got Do you know what it takes for people, ordinary citizens, to show up and stay in line till 4AM to speak against something? It does it's not a lot of subjects, you know, that will inspire that level of hatred. So for all the data center builders who are out there, you got to convince us more, man, that this is actually going to do something for us because we're not buying it right now.
Speaker 1:What do you think about the, initiatives from many of the tech companies to offset the increase in power prices? That seems like very logical that if someone's energy bill is actually flat or falling, that takes them out of the line at 4AM.
Speaker 4:Totally. I'm with you. Like, I do think that was a little bit reactive to the populist backlash that was coming against data centers. It remains to be seen whether something like that's actually going to happen or not. And also, comes down to the regulators in the individual states.
Speaker 4:Now, I would totally support that if they make it mandatory. You have to build the amount of power if you're going to be able to do this. But, you know, in general, guys, it's not about the individual policy. It really is an overarching populist backlash against AI. And I think that's what these guys really don't What they underestimate more than anything is that the public utility of this technology is just not bought by the American people on this subject.
Speaker 4:And they really feel as if it's encroaching at a high level, and then at a low level whenever it's your individual community.
Speaker 2:Well, again, part of the part of the part of the story is that the data center doesn't need to be in your backyard to get the value from AI. If you ask Right. Every person I ask outside of tech has a great story to tell you about AI. It could be really simple. It could be, oh, it helped me learn this thing.
Speaker 2:It could be it helped me make this image that I shared a moment with my family. Don't There's the higher level stuff if we can accelerate scientific research and generally increase productivity across the whole economy. All that stuff's great too. But again, the not getting a benefit from being in your own town is like a real thing.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Right. No, exactly. And I'll also say, Jordy, that's a very white collar kind of bias whenever it comes to AI, right? So we're talking about blue collar workers who are Well, you're wearing a lot
Speaker 2:of media. You have a blue collar yourself.
Speaker 4:Brother. Brother, I'm not claiming to be one of these people. No.
Speaker 2:I'm saying you literally have. Yeah. I'm saying you literally have a blue collar.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Fair fair point. That's true. But I'm saying for a lot of these people, you know, let's say you're a teamster, right, and you're talking about, and you're reading articles about self driving cars, and the Teamsters Union is sounding the alarm about this. I mean, remember, you know, vast what is it? 60%, maybe 45% of the of college graduates are doing work where they feel under threat, let's say, from AI?
Speaker 4:And they're like, oh, my God. Like, this job could be gone in two to three years. Right?
Speaker 1:I mean, the current proclamation of doom is around early stage white collar work, not even the white collar thing. What are you seeing in the economy? Weird job numbers, some job growth, but not a lot. It's all health care related and services. Like, how have you been interpreting all the different gyrations in the labor market?
Speaker 4:Yeah. John, we talk about this all the time. We're like, well, the economy's growth is just AI, and then the other back step of it is just health care workers who are, like, caring for boomers, and that's apparently The US economy. That's the the back bone of The US economy are like senior nursing individual, you know, like home health care aides. I'm not even joking.
Speaker 2:This is
Speaker 4:like one of the fastest growing sectors currently of the economy. There's not a lot of innovation. I mean, everybody's worried about tariffs. There's some of the manufacturing blowback that's currently happening. I also think, you know, if you look at the labor market and the housing market, the softness in the housing market specifically, that is the one populous area.
Speaker 4:I'll tell you, there is no issue. Like again, like with weed, when I get the most amount of hate, the most amount of love is if I'm talking about housing. And the inability for people who are my age or, you know, in their forties or all the way up to their forties, and really feel uncompetitive in the housing market. There's a lot of intergenerational rage, you know, boomers. It's just a Wall Street Journal article.
Speaker 4:It might even be in the paper in front of you about how boomers have all of the money. They had a big interactive spread But in their paper these things go viral in the wrong way for a lot of younger Americans. And so I do think that
Speaker 2:there is any part of you believe what I think Silicon Valley believes, which is that widespread diffusion of robotics could ultimately bring down housing prices?
Speaker 4:I don't know. You know, I don't know if anybody's
Speaker 2:Because because obviously the zoning, there's regulatory, there's all these kind of like local level challenges, but I would say that generally, we at this show believe that ten years from now, we'll have millions and millions and millions of robots that can do functionally useful tasks like building homes. And you could send an army of these robots and build a suburb in relatively short period of time. And so I
Speaker 4:It kind of ignores the demand side issue though, you know, because right now, the builders will tell you that they are fully capable of building a smaller, cheaper type of house, but that that's not where the market is in terms of the people who have money. Part of the reason that we've seen the rise of big mansions and larger houses is because that's the demand side problem, where a lot of people who have more money are the people who are willing to buy these bigger, more palatial homes with lots of experiences in it. The suburb you're thinking about, my idealized, one of my favorite books, is about the 1950s. There were these things called Levittowns, you know, where Mr. Levitt would build a suburb and be 1,500 square foot house.
Speaker 4:You know, wasn't that great? A couple bedrooms. It had a car park, not a garage, but, you know, little covered parking area. It was a couple thirty, forty minutes from the city. But this was the dream, you know, for a lot of Americans, the so called starter home.
Speaker 4:The starter home doesn't exist. Where I live, here in Northern Virginia, the original starter homes from the nineteen seventies go for $1,200,000. Okay?
Speaker 1:They've been renovated with a ton of stuff.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And they've been massively renovated with the, you know, the rain shower and all this other stuff for the people who can afford it. So, Jordy, the thing I think that ignores, I'd have to look it up. What percent of housing cost is ascribed to labor? And what percent of housing scarcity is because of the labor constraint that, know, or labor costs, and not regulatory and existing home ownership costs.
Speaker 2:You're talking about standards when we when when people reflect on the golden sort of era of American history, when every, you know, family could, you know, own their home with a single income. The houses were just tiny. Right? Yeah. It was They were homes that today people Well, we would
Speaker 4:consider them tiny.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. No. I'm saying people generally would look at them today and be like, I can't raise a family in that house. But there was a time that Mhmm.
Speaker 2:We did. And the boomers had wonderful child wonderful childhoods. Yeah.
Speaker 8:They're fine. And then
Speaker 2:bought the entire economy for a potato.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Right. And then well, yeah. Go
Speaker 1:ahead, John. I I think the biggest bull case for housing is probably more related to self driving cars. I saw this saw this chart that showed that, that basically most humans have sort of a commute budget where they will are willing to spend up to thirty, forty five minutes, a day commuting each way. And so, before the horse and carriage, the cities were this big and then the horse and carriage expanded it to how long you could take thirty minute horse ride into your job. Then when the car when the bus line came and the train and the faster car, everything got a little bit more sprawling.
Speaker 1:And if you think about, okay, well, I don't love being in the car for an hour, but if it's a self driving car and I'm just sort of sleeping in the back, that probably extends that commute budget a little bit. And then people just push out further into the suburbs. And we do get new suburbs, but they're just in more undeveloped
Speaker 2:areas Right.
Speaker 4:Or away.
Speaker 1:Farther away with the land's cheaper.
Speaker 4:Yeah. The other the other connection to that I would add is Starlink, and that's one I really thought about during COVID is how Starlink opened up an entire part of the country where for years, access to non broadband internet is a death sentence for working from home. Mean, I wouldn't even be able to do something like this. Let's say I was traveling
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And I was on a camping trip or whatever. Now, I could stream into I mean, shit. I think I could be on a United flight with Starlink and I could stream in with perfect quality.
Speaker 2:Viral videos of people being like, I just got on a six hour flight and the person sitting next to me is doing has done three podcasts already. Right.
Speaker 4:It's like, plea by the way, do not do that.
Speaker 1:Do not do that. You are
Speaker 4:an asshole. Do not do that. Yeah. Do not take an interview.
Speaker 1:Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat.
Speaker 2:I'm glad that we could agree that there's a a technical capital solution for every problem in our lives.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 4:For Perhaps maybe followed by a political solution to that type
Speaker 1:of capitalism. Oh, no. We'll get into that next time. Have a great rest of your day, Sagar. We'll talk to you Thank
Speaker 2:you. Good to see you.
Speaker 1:Goodbye. Let me tell you about vibe.co, where d to c brands, b to b startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, measure sales just like on Meta and without ado.
Speaker 2:Profanity alert. Profanity alert. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Yes. Thank you. Yes. Yes. We need to
Speaker 2:take that. Swears like a sailor.
Speaker 1:Cleaning it up. We will be bleeping him in post potentially. I don't know if we'll actually do that. But anyway, we have Dylan Fields from Figma in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TV then.
Speaker 1:Show him. Dylan, how are doing?
Speaker 9:Hey. Good. How are you guys doing? Oh, sleep back.
Speaker 1:So we're doing great.
Speaker 2:Great to see you. Did you
Speaker 1:hear the news? America just won in overtime. We beat the Canadians.
Speaker 9:I did not hear that news. In hockey.
Speaker 1:In the Olympics. In hockey. Yeah. Oh, wow. It's great.
Speaker 2:There's a lot to celebrate.
Speaker 1:Yes. But give us exciting. But give us the news in your world. How are things going?
Speaker 9:It's good. We're working hard, having fun. But, yeah, we just did our earnings and Mhmm. Really strong results. So we're super excited.
Speaker 9:Yeah. 2025 was just a massive year for us, and the fourth quarter was our best quarter yet.
Speaker 1:So we have percent year over year growth. Right?
Speaker 9:You got it. That's sweet. 304 304,000,000 in revenue. Wow. And then also, yeah, we we look at the whole year.
Speaker 9:I mean, we just shipped so much. Went from four to eight products, launched over 200 features. And most recently, earlier this week Mhmm. On Tuesday, we launched a Cloud Code to Figma design pathway where you can go from code to the Figma Canvas. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And I'm really excited about how we can do this entire round trip
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And make it possible so that wherever you start, we can give you a way to go anywhere on the Figma platform.
Speaker 1:Do you think people are sort of underappreciating that loop because so many of the experiences with agentic coding systems like Cloud Code are very toy projects. Like, the first time I used Codex on desktop, just remade the TVPN homepage to look like look like Berkshire Hathaway's website. And it's like, I just took a screenshot. I didn't need to do any real work. It was a five minute thing.
Speaker 1:And I think a lot of people are amazed by the, like, toy projects, but then they don't really think about what's happening when there's a design system. This is a large organization. This is an enterprise. This is going to be something that's enduring. And so can you share a little bit more about that flywheel and what it takes to actually put these tools to use in a serious way?
Speaker 9:You know, I think it's actually really important even when you're maybe it's my mindset. I'm a perfectionist.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But,
Speaker 9:even for the toy projects, I wanna go figure out, like, what is the best expression of my fun toy project.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 9:You know? Maybe something like a brochure halfway website is a fairly constrained form factor. Yeah. And so maybe that's not the best example.
Speaker 1:It's like HTML three.
Speaker 9:I recently made for example, my friend was like, I wanna go viral in this year, and it was a birthday. Yeah. Like, my goal for this year of my life is to go viral.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 9:I'm like, that well, that's kinda weird, but cool. Yeah. And so I made them a website.
Speaker 2:Lot of space to explore there. There's a lot of ways to go viral. Some can be good.
Speaker 1:Go on an airplane. Yell at Yeah.
Speaker 9:What I probably should have done is hey said, hey, go talk to these guys. But instead,
Speaker 2:I I made them
Speaker 9:a website with Picoumiq. Cool. And made it, you know, really beautiful and tried a few different directions out. And, yeah, you know, very quickly got to, okay, here is sort of with some custom prompting, like, a list of ways for them to go viral given who they are, and and then it's all collected together in a nice way. But even for a fun project like that, that's just like, you know, I'm gonna send to them.
Speaker 9:They're gonna do whatever they do. I don't know if they're gonna look at it more than a few times or even a few times. But I don't know. For me, I wanna go explore wide
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Enterprise. Yeah. You absolutely need to go think deeply about what's gonna make the best product experience for your customers, and that's not gonna be just a we're gonna go code it up and we're gonna do whatever we come up with first. Mhmm. You're going to go actually think through the option space and try to figure out what it is that you want to go steer towards.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:That is critical. Mhmm. And if you don't think about that as a system, if you don't actually use all the components you've standardized on, the styles, then you're not gonna appear the same way to your customer throughout the entire user journey. And it has to really tie together with brand as well as your product, as well as your point of view and your marketing and your messaging. So it's super important to make it so that you're able to have all that come together.
Speaker 9:And, just being in code, I think, is very linear. You might be running fast, but you might be running towards the wrong direction.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What's driving the Figma make growth? Is that the the same archetype as the Figma user? Does it diverge in any interesting ways? What can you share about, like, how interesting ways people are using Figma Make and also how you're thinking about growing that product?
Speaker 9:Yeah. When you look at Figma Make, I think what's really cool is to see how many nondesigners are using it.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 9:And that is something that we've really picked up on. It's not just designers that are going in and making really amazing prototypes through Figma design, but also folks are coming in and making these files and prototypes and actually full working web apps and experiences. I mean, 60% of files created in Figma Make are nondesigners at this point.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 9:Which is amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I mean, that was a big part of the original Figma thesis was that there were going to be nondesigners using this tool Yep. From day one.
Speaker 2:Basically, if you did if you looked at the TAM of the business purely on on a, you know, product designer basis, it didn't look like it would be Yeah. Business today.
Speaker 1:I don't think you ever had a job as designer. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And you've been using Figma every day for a decade.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So yeah. That yeah. That's interesting. How do you think about the growth of that product in terms of adding plug ins, features, hosting, deployment, uptime, edge distribution?
Speaker 1:Like, that could grow into its whole thing. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Or or maybe a more simple question is like, where where do you wanna partner? Yeah. Where do you wanna build yourself?
Speaker 9:Yeah. I mean, I think that we're gonna see tons of partnerships Mhmm. For things like FigmaMake where you need to be able to pull in context from whatever system people use.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And then with that, use it to help create and help access data. Mhmm. But more importantly, I think that it's really key that we both create a simple surface
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:That if you're just getting started, you can use. And, also, we figure out how do we make it so that you're able to go above and beyond and go really professional
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And do do things that basically require a skill ladder to traverse.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:But visual first. I mean, that's the thesis. It's visual first. But, yeah, make users grew 70% quarter over quarter. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:I mean, we're seeing great adoption. I think people are really resonating with the product and finding all sorts of fun and awesome use cases for it. And I I think there's such opportunity given the way that our active users of Make are also using Figma Design to bring these services closer together, which I think is back to the divergent point because Make is still too linear for my taste.
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting.
Speaker 2:What what are what feature requests are you prioritizing and most thinking about, and and what are some maybe more wild feature requests that, you may Figma may not get to?
Speaker 9:Well, I mean, there's a feature request in this conversation to go do edge computing. I don't think that's
Speaker 1:gonna happen. Okay.
Speaker 9:You know, all of our all of the the folks out there working on edge computing, you know, come partner with
Speaker 2:us. Hardware.
Speaker 9:We're we're not in your space. Don't worry.
Speaker 1:Hardware. I I want a hardware device. You you you mentioned taste. How have you been reacting to the taste discourse? Is taste a new
Speaker 2:How many different cycles of taste discourse have happened since Figma was started. I I think about companies like, like Linear who who like, to me, exemplify like a taste driven company. Yeah. And and how many of these cycles where they're like, oh, they they care about this again. Great.
Speaker 9:I I mean, look. Like, I think that from the start of Figma, you know, the the goal was not just to get everyone doing design or making design software usable by everybody and expanding the market. That wasn't the way we thought about it. It was like, how do we get people started on this journey where they can actually go and be more expressive, more creative, and, you know, really start to solve problems? And, you know, maybe it was a bit of, like, projection, but for me at least, I wake up in the morning.
Speaker 9:I'm like, I wanna go create software. I wanna go build stuff. And so how do I make it so that anyone with that impulse can just do that? That doesn't mean they're all gonna have, like, taste and craft and epic design skills. I mean, I think for the rest of my life, I can work on that.
Speaker 9:And many designers have made that a lifelong pursuit.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. There's something there's something that that's very real where you start on this creative journey and your taste level can be way above your skill level. And it's incredibly frustrating. And some people start and they just stop Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because they feel like like I have this idea for what I want something to look like or be like and I'm kind of like trying to make things that match that and I can't. Yep. And that's part of why AI in general is like incredibly exciting because it can help you close that gap faster and potentially help you close that gap almost instantly in some circumstances. Mhmm. But you might create a 100 different outputs before getting to the one that actually meets that, you know, level.
Speaker 9:Yeah. I think that the the key thing is that you really have to go wide and explore and then challenge yourself. Mhmm. If you find areas where you're going, hey. Actually, I don't feel like I am liking this enough.
Speaker 9:I'm not happy enough with a solution, then you gotta go keep pushing. But the more you can sample the possibility space and see some things that you like and you don't like, it gives you something to react to. Mhmm. And I think that the the constant thing is you need to be constantly critiquing and thinking about what is it that you like, you don't like, etcetera. And, you know, people talk about agents all the time, and I'm I'm obsessed with agents too.
Speaker 9:We all are. Right? Agents are cool. But
Speaker 2:How many Mac minis do you have?
Speaker 9:No comment.
Speaker 2:No comment. Comment. He's the reason that
Speaker 1:Mac I swear minis sold
Speaker 9:I am not Claude Bot. But anyway but yeah. But, like, I think the the bigger point going back to taste
Speaker 1:is Yeah.
Speaker 9:You know, if an agent can do it for you, then unless you got some amazing sophisticated prompting and super unique, like, an agent can do it for someone else. Mhmm. And so I think that this discourse on, like, agents are just gonna do all the things. Well, what is different about your setup than others? Mhmm.
Speaker 9:You at least have to have something different there in order to not think that you're just gonna get the same thing or else you're get. Yeah. Well, even then, I don't know if it's gonna get you to get extraordinary.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. We we read a post yesterday that was sort of trying to quantify the the background that leads to taste. And it was basically saying that, like, Steve Jobs was incredibly high IQ, but also had, like, varied training data in that he had, like, been homeless and, like, traveled the world and, like, got all these, like, bizarre experiences. And I'm wondering if that, like, resonates with you or you think that it's it's, like, too difficult to even quantize what makes for a great designer or great taste.
Speaker 9:You know, I think that the great designers I've met through my life have come from so many different backgrounds. You know, a lot of a lot of folks have come through rigorous design training. Like, they just just went through a system.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 9:And other people, wow, they went and created, you know, their band poster.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And that got them into, like, graphic design. Then somehow they, like, showed up at the right house and crashed in someone's couch and then became a product designer and then everyone went back. Yeah. You know? So, yeah, everything in between.
Speaker 9:And there's not really a pattern. Some people have traveled the world and, you know, gone on the meditation retreats, and some people are, like, as buttoned up as you could get and just totally straight laced. I I I think that the nice thing about designers is they're so unique, and there's no better matching.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How do you think about variability of design going forward? Are we
Speaker 9:So excited.
Speaker 1:Are we at a sort of a narrowing period because most people come with just a generic prompt? Or because I saw your Figma make examples, and I was like, I didn't even know that was possible. There were so but I was like, I would never have gotten there. So is are are there gonna be tools to maybe help people, like, be inspired by your background, which has a whole bunch of variation on it?
Speaker 2:I I I don't know. Texting.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I'm just I'm just wondering because, I mean, we were just we were just talking about a company that it feels like the prompt was, copy Jordy's website. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe it's just coincidence, but it felt like, okay, like, there wasn't, there wasn't, like, a twist here where it was like, oh, just do something completely different that's never been applied to this particular category at least. Like, steal from a different niche instead of from the one that's, like, very, very similar.
Speaker 1:But I'm I'm wondering how you're how you're seeing, like, variation in design take take take hold in in the world.
Speaker 9:Yeah. This is the moment, I think, where we're gonna see the pendulum go from I mean, let's look back. Right? So we had the Flash era, GeoCities. Like, I'm not saying it was high quality era, but there is a lot of variation.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And then iPhone comes down as, like, skeuomorphism and then, like, Swiss minimalist design.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And nothing wrong with Swiss minimalist design. Like, that is a really cool and storied field and lineage. Yeah. But it is just one part of the greater aesthetic realm, and we can go into such interesting places and try so many interesting patterns on the UX side too. It's not just UI and the visuals.
Speaker 9:It's also the structure, the IA, the way that people navigate through these things and interaction patterns.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And I think there's innovation that's gonna be flourishing on all of it. Mhmm. And I'm just so excited to see the Internet get, like, really dynamic
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And really visual, and try people try things that they just have we haven't seen in a while and and things that people haven't seen ever. Because I think that that's what's gonna take to stand out now. There's been so much there. Like, the exponential curve of software is just
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:It's taking off in a way that it's always been exponential, but now it's vertical. We talked about this before. And in order to stand out, I mean, you guys have a show that you're managing to actually break through and get people to be watching this. Like, this is not normal. Right?
Speaker 9:Like but you have worked very hard, very diligently to create the conditions under which you have this audience. Well, this this this thing that everyone has to figure out now is how are you gonna actually get any attention in a world where there's constantly new information
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Even beyond America winning the ice hockey match. So
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's it's I've been I've been thinking about how Gen AI is impacting marketing. It's allowing somebody has like a unique idea Mhmm. And then it used to be like you had like at least a month to kind of like run with that unique idea. Maybe three months if it was like a specific campaign or something like that.
Speaker 2:And now somebody can literally fast follow you and your idea almost immediately. So good ideas always get copied Yeah. But they get Mhmm. Copied even faster now. Another thing that that I was thinking about when you're talking about kind of the explosion of UI, John had a had a post yesterday that he was sort of jokingly making like a BuzzFeed style listicle, like five five features that could explode your LLM's usage or something like that.
Speaker 2:And one of them was like caching. Yeah. And people have had this idea of like, generative UIs, UIs that's being made like on the fly. And I feel like we may get we may like have products where that's happening. Right?
Speaker 2:Like, you're in an LLM and a Sure. UI is being generated. But it will still make sense, like, if if there's something that happens all the time, like, thousands, millions of times a day, billions. Like, it does not it really stops making sense to just generate it on the fly. It's like, hey.
Speaker 2:This happens a lot. Let's, like Yeah. Make the best version of this, and we don't need to, like,
Speaker 9:wipe this actually. Okay. Exactly this topic. I can send it to you if you want. But the, basically, the post was about how the length of time that an artifact will exist for is inversely proportional to the likelihood it's gonna be generated.
Speaker 9:And I think this is true across media. So, basically, like, if you are writing a book, unlikely that you're gonna have, like, AI just generate your book.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Amazon booksellers would like to worry.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Clearly, you just you can just say you don't read adult romantic fiction. Fiction. Get it.
Speaker 2:No. No. No. I think I think I think yeah.
Speaker 9:But, like, I think, you know, something that's like a ad that will live for, you know, a few hours.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 9:Like, yeah, probably you're gonna have an agent that's gonna generate that.
Speaker 2:Totally. Yeah. Yeah. The difference is, like, you're making an asset for to respond to with a meme format to news. Makes a lot of sense to, like, put that through a nana banana or ChatGPT.
Speaker 2:But if you're putting making a billboard, maybe you're still using AI to some degree, but you're gonna invest, like, significantly more time.
Speaker 9:Think if you're gonna make a billboard that's gonna cost money and people can be up for a month and, you know, a lot of people are gonna see it. I I think you're gonna have a human touch. Yeah. We actually with Weave, now Figma Weave
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:We you know, we've been looking a lot at these kinds of use cases, and, you know, one thing that just we think a lot a lot is how you hear this first prompt, but then you actually wanna go and have it go through a process where you can transform and mutate it. And almost like clay that's being shaped, you can treat it like a medium to get to a final output that's amazing. So, like, in our earnings call, we talked about how NVIDIA, which they've actually done since a public case study, they put the entire making of this keynote online, and they use Weebie with it. And what they did was they had all these robots, and they needed to basically get to a 20 k image of this whole scene. Oh.
Speaker 9:Like, how do you create a 20 k image with perfect lighting throughout? I mean, it's really tough. Yeah. So they had a whole custom pipeline with Weebly they did. Yeah.
Speaker 9:And just like the amount of work to go do that at scale of that pixel density Mhmm. Is immense, and I I thought their workflow was super cool as well.
Speaker 1:That's awesome.
Speaker 9:With you too.
Speaker 1:I love it. Cool. Yeah. Please send us that. And thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.
Speaker 9:Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Always a good time.
Speaker 2:Were we were so fired up seeing the results from yesterday. Really a testament to how locked in locked in the team.
Speaker 9:The team is amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:They're working so hard, and, they're just an incredible team. I'm so grateful. Yeah. And I think it's a proof point.
Speaker 2:I mean,
Speaker 9:I think that we're we're gonna see it over and over again, whether it's the taste discourse.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Just customers with Figma, but design is a differentiator. Like, figure it out. Go learn design. Hire your designer. Otherwise, you're gonna have a hard time.
Speaker 9:That's my last message.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for taking the time.
Speaker 2:Great to
Speaker 1:see you. Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon. Up next, we have Peter Morales from Code Metal, and we are kicking off our Lambda Lightning round. I believe Peter is in the restream waiting room.
Speaker 1:He's about to be in the TBP And Ultradome. But the Lambda Lightning round has begun. Here we go.
Speaker 2:What's happening?
Speaker 1:Thanks for hopping on. How you doing?
Speaker 7:Great. Good. Good. Great to
Speaker 2:meet you.
Speaker 1:Time in the show, please introduce yourself and the company.
Speaker 7:Hi. I'm, Peter Morales. I'm the CEO of CodeMetal. It's great to meet you guys. Excited to be on the show.
Speaker 2:Extremely metal name. I'm sure you've you've heard that before but I had to do it. I love the name. Yeah. What what got you into this?
Speaker 2:Talk about your journey, how you got here and then we'll get into the business.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So at least for me, I started my career in defense. I'd graduated with a physics degree, and this was one of the areas that was like, hey, we want people with that background. And turns out it was an awesome area to jump into. You got to apply first principles, but then also build systems that had impact.
Speaker 7:And so spent some time developing basically taking software that was written at a high level and bringing it down to low level hardware systems. And the reason being was I was a big programming nerd, but also kinda understood the math, and it was a sweet spot of translating software to hardware. So I got to work on some cool AI algorithms on the f 35, and that kinda inspired me to do Wow. Work in that place. So I went over to MIT Lincoln Laboratory and started doing research in AI, got to be one of the founding members of their AI technology group, and then ended up going to Microsoft where I was hoping to put all these pieces together and get to build, like, sort of more for commercial industry products that took sort of state of the art algorithms and brought it down to hardware.
Speaker 7:And so I was working on the HoloLens and hoping to learn kind of these, like, industry best practices. And it was the same as defense, man. It was just as, like, hard to push the latest and greatest down to hardware. You know, inspiration behind CodeMetal was there's got to be a better way to do this.
Speaker 2:Makes a lot of sense. Before we go further, I don't know what or how much you can share around AI and the F 35, but generally for those types of exquisite systems, like how, you know, back when you were actually doing that work, what where where is AI actually be impactful in an exquisite system like that?
Speaker 7:Yeah. So you gotta view it from, like, our perspective, which is like, hey, we're gonna take these at the time kinda really cool algorithms, and bring these down to ancient processors. So Mhmm. Exquisite system, but horrible hardware systems to actually get the algorithms running. And this was part of the DARPA ARC program.
Speaker 7:So it's like adaptive radar countermeasures. So the idea being is, hey. I've spotted you in the sky, and I'm gonna go ahead and, like, try and take you out now. But maybe I don't know the complete parameters behind what that system's doing. And so I need to kinda on the fly come up with a strategy to defeat, you know, those missile sites on the ground.
Speaker 7:And so applying some different techniques to that, I can't talk about, was sort of the the gist of the game.
Speaker 2:Fascinating. Give us the quick history on CodeMetal then. When when did you actually start the company? You're coming on today with some big news, but, give us give us, the history until now.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So it's been a real rocket ship. We started just two years ago.
Speaker 1:Wow. Overnight success. Nice.
Speaker 7:So, yeah, we we've we've had really, really great partners. J two Ventures did our pre seed round.
Speaker 1:Cool.
Speaker 7:And, you know, their roll your sleeves up kinda, like, help you founder friendly fun, And we jumped right into it at Shield Capital who really understood the dual use mission. And then, you know, once we started seeing this takeoff and sort of for us, and I'll get into what we do exactly, you know, in some of the mission critical industries that we operate, You know, Excel jumped in, and it's just been sort of, you know, milestone after another in terms of, like, you know, the real the real problem that we're solving, which maybe I should give some background on next.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Please.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Go for it.
Speaker 7:Yeah. There there's this explosion, you know, of basically AI generated code. And it's great. You know, you can build an MVP. But I'm sure all of you have been working, like, with, you know, Claude or or, you know, OpenAI.
Speaker 7:Maybe you've asked it, are you sure? Or, like, you know, is this right?
Speaker 1:Don't make mistakes.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Build me a brake system.
Speaker 7:No mistakes. Yeah. And
Speaker 2:you say you're you're 100% sure on this. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Yeah. It's like
Speaker 2:turns out to be wrong.
Speaker 1:Take off from the aircraft carrier. You're good to go. Yeah. Yeah. No.
Speaker 1:Okay. Crazy.
Speaker 7:So yeah. So so so the idea here is, like, we wanna answer that question. So as much as we're an AI company, we're an AI verification company. And that means, inherently, you these systems are stochastic. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Right? And so you can't necessarily rely on AI to check AI. And so we're leveraging a lot of techniques both from sort of traditional test verification and formal methods to basically prove as you work your way through these hard software challenges that we have done the identical thing that you put in. And in this case, we can't rely on natural language. Like like, writing a prompt is not a good way to define how, like, an exquisite system needs to operate.
Speaker 7:And so we're not, like, a low code or no code. We're a high code, you know, to stop. And we focus on basically solving software problems that are the real tall tent poles in production, namely moving from MVP to production for some of, like, the biggest industries and, you know, defense being obviously one of those based on our backgrounds.
Speaker 1:Very cool. Take us through the funding round. What happened?
Speaker 7:Yeah. So exciting news to announce today. We have announced our series b, a 125,000,000 That
Speaker 1:won't be too far for
Speaker 2:you. Wow. Okay. Amazing.
Speaker 1:And tell us about the new president and COO. How'd you meet? What is he gonna be doing? Why is that an important role to fill?
Speaker 7:And I think that's the second big announcement for us. We've been really heads down a bunch of us, you know, engineering nerds and, you know, also starting to grow into business folks like Laura Shen. She joined us from National Security Council, had a background at Uber Mhmm. And really was sort of like my main teammate on the selling side. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:But we've grown a lot since then, and we've got, you know, operational needs. We need leadership on sort of working with some of these bigger clients that we started to talk to on the technology side. And, yeah, Ryan Atay from CEO of Tableau actually joined us as president and COO. Oh. And, yeah, he's been awesome already.
Speaker 7:Like, we we we learned about him through our network and sort of trying to find the right person who had the right sort of curious attitude, one of the first principles come in and do something actually really new. And, yeah, he's been an awesome force, just experience working with some of, you know, your Nvidia's of the world, the different partnerships that he's had at the places he's deployed. You know, he knows our customers. And so having him on the team has just been awesome.
Speaker 2:Assuming you guys execute your road map perfectly, which I'm sure you will Yeah. What does it do to hardware development timelines, things like that? Like, are we or is part of CodeMetal's job to bring the acceleration that developers are feeling when they're building, you know, enterprise software? Maybe they're building, you know, AI apps, etcetera, to bring that to the hardware level.
Speaker 7:Yeah. You're nailing it. So, like, a lot of these industries have had, like you know, they're not one generation behind in who I wanna use AI tools. They're, like, many generations behind even what you get if you're, like, a cloud developer. So, you know, I I look at it as three different things.
Speaker 7:The first is, like, getting actual features, acting like you're a vertically integrated software hardware company because all of a sudden, you can push things directly to hardware and see those things run on whatever system. So that's sort of our our, you know, rapid development vertical. Then you've got code portability. So they're huge supply chain problems. So, you know, we we've talked to, for instance, like, army, and they've got, you know, hey.
Speaker 7:We write all this code for NVIDIA GPUs. Like, it's ours. Like, we've we've developed it. We maybe have supply chain issues here. Can we run on a different piece of hardware?
Speaker 7:Mhmm. All of a sudden, that's gonna gum up the works. You're gonna have to pay every contractor to rewrite the code. Yep. They could translate that.
Speaker 7:That solves programmability. That solves supply chain issues. That's another huge area of growth we're seeing. And then finally is, like, legacy systems. Like, there's been so much investment in code that thou shall not touch, we just put a box around it and talk to it.
Speaker 7:Being able to update those and deploy those has been another big area of growth for us.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Very important work. Thank you for
Speaker 2:Code metal is accelerating.
Speaker 1:It's heavy metal. I love it.
Speaker 2:Customers are accelerating. It's it's very metal.
Speaker 1:Yes. And congratulations on the funding round.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Congrats to the whole team.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for coming on
Speaker 2:the show. At this rate, I'm sure you'll be back on Yeah. In q two.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to
Speaker 2:you soon. Fun out there.
Speaker 1:Have a good one, Peter.
Speaker 2:Cheers, Peter.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely bank connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI.
Speaker 2:Up next, we do not We have
Speaker 1:Eric from Freeform joining in just a few minutes. But in the meantime, we can talk about from the show Willie, it sounds like he's here. So we are going to bring in Eric from Freeform. He's been on the show before. Welcome back.
Speaker 1:You doing,
Speaker 2:Eric? What's
Speaker 10:going on? It's yeah. Good to see you guys.
Speaker 1:Very cool background. Kick us off with an explanation.
Speaker 2:These are all squat racks that
Speaker 1:we're seeing.
Speaker 2:Right? Yeah.
Speaker 10:These are just fancy looking things. You know? They don't really do anything. What you're looking at behind us is our next generation manufacturing platform
Speaker 1:Very cool.
Speaker 10:We call Skyfall. Mhmm. It'll be the fastest and most automated laser melting platform on the planet. I think last time we talked Yeah. We had talked about how we were getting ready to design and build this, and now we're almost done building it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Amazing. What else happened? There's some news.
Speaker 10:Oh. Oh, man. Lots of new lots of amazing news. We just closed a big series b, $67,000,000. You know, we're we're
Speaker 1:We gotta hit the
Speaker 2:gong. Amazing.
Speaker 10:Amazing. We've talked about getting a gong in the office too. I love it.
Speaker 1:You should.
Speaker 2:We know we know
Speaker 4:We know
Speaker 2:some we know the finest We need
Speaker 1:some GONGs.
Speaker 2:Manufacturers in the country. So Yes. Happy to give a reference.
Speaker 10:Yeah. We'll have to get a you'll have to pass those along to us. We it was yeah. Led by Apandeon Mhmm. Michael Linz of Linz Capital.
Speaker 10:NVIDIA participated, Founders Fund, Threshold, Two Sigma Ventures. We've got an amazing cap table of investors Yeah. With deep expertise and and operational scaling and deep tech space. It's been great.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Where's the biggest source of customer growth coming from? Like, where what products are actually getting made, at least that you can talk about?
Speaker 10:Yeah. For sure. I would say there's growth across a lot of different sectors. You know, we're demand has outpaced capacity Mhmm. Which is amazing, and we're building a substantial back backlog.
Speaker 10:Mhmm. Yeah. It's it's been it's been fantastic. Obviously, you know, there are a lot of critical industries out there, you know, the geopolitical climates Terrorists. Of of the world today where flexible manufacturing is becoming much more more and more important.
Speaker 10:Shortening shortening iteration cycles, being able to scale up quickly. Mhmm. These things are just super important in that space. And then, you know, you're just seeing I think this you know, the the the advancements in AI are are driving, you know, advances in engineering, in design, in access to information that is accelerating product design, which then people, you know, wanna build faster and scale faster. Mhmm.
Speaker 10:So there's all these kind of forces that are driving advancement in all sorts of different industries where or problems that there these industries are looking to advance manufacturing technologies to solve.
Speaker 1:Talk about aerospace or or or maybe building airplanes generally. I imagine that we're not using free form to make the fuselage, but are we talking about, like, you know, the seat belt buckles or, blades inside of a jet engine? Like, at what at what scale are we operating here?
Speaker 10:Yeah. For sure. Great question. No. We're not making the fuselages.
Speaker 10:I think Mhmm. The the you know, we're not a hammer looking for a nail.
Speaker 1:Sure. Or a hammer looking for a face.
Speaker 10:That's right. That's right. The you know, we're generally talking about parts that are of the scale. You know, the the the platform behind us is roughly 600 millimeters by 600 millimeters by a meter tall. Mhmm.
Speaker 10:So something that can fit into that envelope. Mhmm. Obviously, we can make extremely high precision things. We can make them out of virtually any material, any metal. Mhmm.
Speaker 10:And and, you know, intricate features, big big features, small features, we can do just about anything.
Speaker 1:Any metal. You know what I'm thinking? Coffee maker made purely out of lead. Lead based coffee maker.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's a very viral coffee maker trying to be free of plastics and so John
Speaker 1:I mean a lead based coffee maker would
Speaker 10:Yeah. Be free of Clearly not It
Speaker 1:wouldn't have any plastic.
Speaker 10:No no problem.
Speaker 1:No problem. Yeah.
Speaker 2:How much have you scaled up the team since we last chatted? Yeah. Where where where is that going?
Speaker 10:Yeah. It's fantastic. And I wanna add on to my answer to your last question We're flying mission critical parts on multiple frontier programs today.
Speaker 5:Wow.
Speaker 10:We're at we are shipping out of the factory many hundreds of parts per month that are going on, you know, very important vehicles and Mhmm. And systems. Cool. So for the team question, we're about 60 people, 55, 60 people now. I think when we spoke last, we were maybe 35
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 10:40 ish. Yeah. And we're trying to hire about a 100 people over the next, you know, twelve months.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 10:So, you know, we are And where where
Speaker 2:are those jobs gonna be where are those jobs gonna be based? All in the same place or you actually
Speaker 10:here in Hawthorne.
Speaker 1:Cool.
Speaker 10:For now.
Speaker 1:Yep. Very great. Amazing. On
Speaker 2:the on the parts side, like, what what's the what tons of demand, but where where why are customers actually choosing you guys? Is there kind of a speed up around kind of like order, timelines, things like that? Like, where where what's making customers the most happy?
Speaker 10:Yeah. I think, you know, honestly, we've cracked the code. I mean, the the world
Speaker 1:the the the It's here for cracking codes. I think we're love cracking Yes.
Speaker 10:When we when we talked before Yeah. It's just interesting, you know, how far we've come in in a relatively short period of time. You know, I think the the rigidity and inflexibility of manufacturing traditional manufacturing systems is just no longer acceptable. And you you've got this massive advancement in the digital world that's occurring, these transformations that are happening, and the way we make stuff hasn't really changed in in decades. Mhmm.
Speaker 10:Not not fundamentally. Yeah. And so, you know, I think customers are looking to design more and more advanced things. They're looking to control physics in new and different ways. You know, you can I saw over my my decade plus at SpaceX, you can design, you know, the the most advanced things, but the real problem is when you go to make it?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 10:And, you know, closing this gap is becoming really important. And, you know, what do companies wanna do? They wanna focus on what they're good at. And the code we've cracked is that we we are the most successful and fastest growing company in the advanced manufacturing space that leverages printing ever. Mhmm.
Speaker 10:And because we have developed, we we've solved all of the major problems that were fundamentally preventing the technology from being scalable. Mhmm. And so that's you know, we're no longer in the proof of concept phase where we're proving, you know, the the theory of it. We are this capital is being deployed to massively expand capacity to meet the the demands that we're building backlog and it's continuing to accelerate.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Amazing.
Speaker 1:Last question for me. What's the biggest lesson that you learned from SpaceX that you find useful applying today?
Speaker 10:Oh, man. I wish I think you asked me a similar question last time. There's so many lessons. I'm so fortunate to have had such an amazing experience.
Speaker 2:But maybe a different answer now maybe a different answer now than when we last chatted. You know, you've the the codes have been cracked. Yeah.
Speaker 10:Yeah. I mean, I think that what comes to mind is, you know, the the relentless pursuit of the thing that you know is possible. You just you have to fundamentally believe in what you're doing. It has to be based on, you know, first principles, like Mhmm. This is a possible thing, and then I am just we are gonna relentlessly pursue it until we get it across the finish line.
Speaker 10:And I think that's why we've been so successful here. You know? Combined with the willingness to it's not about how hard something is or if I know how to do it or I don't. Mhmm. If I if I don't know how to do it, but it needs to be done, I've gotta figure it out.
Speaker 10:And we're so vertically integrated across everything we do from software to machine learning to advanced compute to electronics to the physical platforms that we build ourselves that this is something I don't think there's any other company out there that is like us on on this front. We don't use third party products at all. Nowhere in the stack, top top to bottom.
Speaker 2:It's crazy.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations on the progress.
Speaker 2:Congrats to the whole team on all the Great. All all the progress. I'd love to hear that you guys are shipping parts.
Speaker 1:In Southern California.
Speaker 10:Let's go.
Speaker 2:I I like the the Hawthorne, Gardenia, Gundam Serious. Long Beach rivalry Yeah. On just who can produce the most mass
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 2:In the world is is fantastic.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, have a great rest of your day. Great to see you too.
Speaker 10:Thanks again for having me again. Goodbye.
Speaker 2:Good to see you.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom Card. Up next, we have Lubisha Basik from Thales. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:What's going on?
Speaker 5:I'm doing well. How are you?
Speaker 1:Did I did I get even close to the name?
Speaker 5:First name, great. Second name, close.
Speaker 1:Okay. Give it to
Speaker 5:us. Beit. Beit. Beit.
Speaker 1:Beit. Okay. Beit. Well Powerful. First time on the show.
Speaker 1:Please introduce yourself and the company.
Speaker 5:Hey. So you introduced my name. Yes. You're Bishop Beit. I'm long time, I guess, chip designer Yeah.
Speaker 5:More than anything else. Yeah. My latest endeavor is Thales. What we do at Thales is you know how I'm sure both of you have used ChatGPT. Right?
Speaker 5:Like, and when you ask a question, you see that, like, you know, words are kinda rendering on the screen. It takes a while.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:If you use it a lot, it costs a fair amount of money. Yeah. Right? So for people that that run code through it or or something like that. So what what we do is we basically make those response show up in milliseconds
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:So that you can ask, you know, you can ask whatever you want and you get like a 100,000 words, it pops up in a split second Yeah. Immediately. The web UI is slower than, you know, than than our chips for the most part. And it's also kinda close to zero cost. So the idea was slower.
Speaker 1:That's crazy.
Speaker 5:Super fast, super cheap.
Speaker 1:You're like, this HD, this JavaScript just doesn't load as fast as the tokens. What a world to be in.
Speaker 2:That's right. And that's happening that's happening today.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:That's happening today. And I guess the way we do this is kinda the opposite of what your previous guest was saying. So, you know, everybody says you should be flexible. We say you should be really inflexible.
Speaker 1:Okay. But you should be hardcore. Okay. Hardcore. So, yeah, take us through the the the technical story here.
Speaker 1:Is this only possible post transformer, post MOE model? Like, how much are you calcifying, and what technical decisions do you have to lock in before you went into tape out?
Speaker 5:So we're not so much, you know, focused on a given model type. So whatever model is popular today, it's transformers with MOE. If it was something else, very likely, most likely, we would have no problem consuming it. Really, the main step is that we take that model and we basically cast it straight into silicon. Oh.
Speaker 5:It's not a it's not a piece of software. It doesn't run on a processor. You know, if at least I as a kid, like, never imagined AI as a as an executable, like Excel or Yeah. Or Word. Like, he was the general mindset was like Dave from Space Odyssey.
Speaker 5:Right? Like or the the Hal from Space Odyssey. Right? Like and so we're kinda, you know, going to that idea and basically making models straight into hardware. Once we make the strip, it's it is a model.
Speaker 5:That's that's basically that's all it is. If you want a new model, you have to check this one out. Again, it's kind of a throwback to to the past, like, where it's kinda like video game consoles.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:You know, there's a receptacle. You unplug a cartridge, you plug in another cartridge, and you have a new model.
Speaker 1:What are the different trade offs when you go to the fab? Are you thinking wafer scale, large die? How do you think about all the trade offs and what is available at modern fabs?
Speaker 5:So our approach is that, you know, we we basically made this one trade, which is commitment or flexibility for kinda everything else. Mhmm. Given that, we tried super hard to make everything else dead simple, which means no interposers, no three d stacking, no super high speed IO, no HVM. The chips are pretty big, but they're really, really simple. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:They plug into a normal server. They don't consume a lot of power. You can cool them by air. You don't really need the you know, you don't need anything but old school data centers. Yeah.
Speaker 5:So it's essentially we we made it such that there's there's this one, you know, sort of compromise that we make you take. Yeah. Having taken that, it's better at everything and it's way simpler than anything else.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What is the what's the sales process and look like for this? And what are what are your customer relationships actually going to look like in practice? Are you I imagine, you know, you you see massive progress on the model side every day. There's a new model.
Speaker 2:Are you like how are you going to scale up kind of like physical production to sort of match that progress? Or is that the wrong way to think about it?
Speaker 5:You know, it's hard to be sure. So I'll answer your all your questions briefly. So on the first one, our default plan is that we're bringing out inference service and we're going to let users basically get to tokens directly. Obviously, we aspire to having large customers like the big AI labs or or hyperscalers. It's just that, you know, like, if your default plan involves closing, you know, what having Microsoft, it's it's a bad default plan.
Speaker 5:Right? Like, it's not an easy Mhmm. It's it's not an easy step. It's not that we're not doing it, but we're we're doing something that's gonna bring us to customers and allow iteration, and it's fully within our hands. Right?
Speaker 5:Like, it it doesn't involve a big uncontrollable step. To to your second question, we might so our approach starts winning at about three months of holding the model. Even if you swap them every three months, we still win. Mhmm. At a year, we win by a lot.
Speaker 5:So at this level, it's really hard to call, but I I'm I feel strongly that there's applications that can certainly tolerate having the same model for half a year at a time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We who exactly those are, I
Speaker 5:don't I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Someone was saying yesterday that GPT 3.5 still gets like a shocking amount of
Speaker 1:So much money. Yeah. It's crazy. I I So
Speaker 5:the other day, GPT four point o was retired. Yeah. There was a bunch of sort of negative remarks on the Internet. People are sad and angry that it's gone and so on. So, I mean, we definitely want to be at the leading edge.
Speaker 5:We think that it's actually quite doable. But in the end, like, where the line is, where sort of people are comfortable with the commitment we need, time's gonna tell. Yeah. Like yeah.
Speaker 1:How much is AI accelerating the translation from the model weights or the model architecture into an actual chip design?
Speaker 5:So in our first generation, not a lot at all. We use it but but lightly. For our second generation, we're actually trying our best to maximize the amount of stuff that AI does versus what what people do. Mhmm. So we're we're aggressively moving that boundary.
Speaker 5:And the cutting edge models have gotten good enough that they can really help a lot. Mhmm. Like, it's we started about two years ago. That wasn't the case back then. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:It's a new phenomenon.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Makes sense.
Speaker 2:Kind of a wild card. How are you thinking about what we expect is an explosion of new AI hardware devices? We're hearing about pins and in ear things. Is this something that could end up in in a consumer electronic device at some point? Or is it better suited Do it.
Speaker 2:For more of these, like, data center or or kind of like enterprise applications?
Speaker 5:So I think it's it's suited to both. And but we're initially targeting data centers, and we made these big chips for that reason Mhmm. As opposed to something that's
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Smaller form factor could fit in a device. Really mainly driven by the fact that this kind of avalanche of of PIN and and such has been announced now. You know, it's been five years away for kind of multiple sets of five years potentially. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Let's not think about VR.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. And and if and you can obviously make a hardware device that can deliver AI without having the chip locally.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, Jordan, anything else?
Speaker 2:No. Let's hit the gong.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yes. Tell us about the news. How much did you raise?
Speaker 5:We actually, the the special thing about today is that we've launched our our first product to the public. Public. Right? We we did raise some money that we didn't announce. Actually, we raised a bunch of money.
Speaker 5:We we hit, like, kind of nirvana where we can live off of off of interest.
Speaker 2:That's scary.
Speaker 5:That's We're, like, you know, $2,220,000,000 raised total. Yeah. But what we're really proud of is that we spend money super slowly and that we we really are living off the interest. Right? That's amazing.
Speaker 2:Well, congratulations. Where where can people go? Do you have a
Speaker 1:chatjimmy.ai if you wanna demo it.
Speaker 5:Yes.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 5:That's that's right.
Speaker 2:It's chat jimmy dot a I.
Speaker 5:Just sent you guys the link. Chat jimmy dot a I
Speaker 1:think you're it's it's Llama three 0.1 eight b?
Speaker 5:That's right.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's right. Baked into
Speaker 2:a chip. It's super fast. Quick. It's fast? Yeah.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 2:It is instant. Faster
Speaker 1:than Fantastic.
Speaker 2:It's it's almost seems faster than my eyes can process.
Speaker 1:That's the point. I I think think that's the future.
Speaker 2:Very cool.
Speaker 5:What we're shooting for.
Speaker 1:Well, congratulations.
Speaker 2:Awesome. It was great to great to meet you.
Speaker 1:Thank
Speaker 2:you for back.
Speaker 1:It's great
Speaker 5:meeting you both. Yeah. Thank you
Speaker 2:very much for having the team.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Cheers. Goodbye.
Speaker 1:Are there any other stories you'd like to go through, Jordy? We could talk about the f one. We could talk about semi analysis. We could talk about the AI doc, where we could talk about all that tomorrow.
Speaker 2:The AI doc, we're working on getting the team from there on. Yeah. We can skip that. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Dylan Dylan Patel is allegedly Scoop. Mulling, raising a venture fund. Sounds like he invested some size into FluidStack It's been made already.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is funny because this is framed as a scoop, and I suppose it is, but they were openly discussing this on a podcast like a month ago. So it's it's it's not that big of news, but it is exciting. We love Dylan Patel. We love some analysis and it'll be very interesting to see what they do.
Speaker 1:I think that there was some there was some mention. I mean, weren't talking about it in fine detail, but just discussion over whether or not this would actually be a full venture fund or if it would be more of an RIA, more public private. There's a variety of different strategies and and Dylan knows a lot of different folks in the ecosystem. Obviously, he works with a lot of hedge funds. And so there's a lot of opportunity up and down the stack, just in the private markets.
Speaker 1:And every venture fund has sort of a different strategy when you have this level of analysis, rigor, data, understanding the markets. There's a whole bunch of different ways to express that financially. And so I'm very, very excited to see what happens. And good luck to the semi analysis team out on the fundraising trail. Well
Speaker 2:Last but not least, a new California law, which is FIP VCC, is forcing VCs to ask portfolio companies about their sexual orientation, disabilities, and more. Also, it can be reported to the state. The team at AngelList built a new system to help funds and AngelList comply without ever seeing individual founder responses. This seems very important to preserve founder privacy everywhere. We've decided to make the system available to any fund for free regardless of who they work with for fund admin.
Speaker 2:Oh.
Speaker 1:I see a bunch funds are running dot
Speaker 2:on AngelList, and we'll have this built in. But important that everybody be able to use this seems like I I remember when this law was originally being
Speaker 1:Is it pass?
Speaker 2:Sounds like it.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:Which is surprising but Yeah. Nothing is surprising in in California.
Speaker 1:Well, DoorDash is surprising to me. Over a billion orders a month.
Speaker 2:They're doing 900,000,000.
Speaker 1:Oh, 900,000,000. Okay.
Speaker 2:900. So let's hit the gong for Oh, that was a Yeah. I can hear it. You probably can't hear it at home.
Speaker 1:Lock in DoorDash folks.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Lock in.
Speaker 1:Keep going.
Speaker 2:We'll wait.
Speaker 1:Call us when you hit a billion. That will impress me. Now, was listening to Keith Raboy talk to Eric Newcomer, and he was saying, like, his whole DoorDash thesis was just the DoorDash was the get food button or the I'm hungry button on your phone. And then there's a whole bunch of hard work that you need to do to actually deliver food, but the consumer impulse was just I'm hungry. And you push the button and you get food.
Speaker 1:And it has worked to the tune of 903,000,000 orders per month. I wonder if there's more around Christmas. Do they always see a December bump? No. Not really.
Speaker 1:December was a good was a good month for them. They jumped. They actually jumped in March in 2021. I don't know if something happened, but they
Speaker 2:Have they ever had a down month? I don't know. Think so.
Speaker 1:They they had a rough time in September '21. Coming out of COVID, it went from three forty five to three forty seven, barely any growth, But I don't think they've ever had a truly down this is quarter. This is quarterly, I guess. Wait. Is this oh, no.
Speaker 1:This is monthly reporting, but you see every four months. So Ben is
Speaker 2:getting us fired up. He says three and a half hours. Let's go.
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 2:We're not quite at the three and a half hour mark. We got two minutes left. There was one more story we didn't get to. Fluow permanently halts redemptions at private credit fund aimed at retail investors.
Speaker 10:Private credit's
Speaker 2:all talking about this as kind of like a layman moment. When I looked at the size of the fund, it's it's 1,700,000,000.0.
Speaker 1:Fund for ants.
Speaker 2:It's a it's a private credit fund for ants. No. Not not great. I remember we talked about this story last year. Yeah.
Speaker 2:They said they they like it kind of leaked that they were considering halting redemptions. Mhmm. They were like, actually, don't worry. We're not. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then now they actually have. So not not
Speaker 1:What do think lock in meant? Lock getting locked in? You just got locked into your investments. No more redemptions. It's the great lock in.
Speaker 2:They they
Speaker 1:Again, don't call it a code red. Call it the great lock in. You're good. Don't call it we're we're suspending redemptions. Call it call it
Speaker 2:A blast. We're gonna blast your returns.
Speaker 1:Yes. Exactly. To the stratosphere.
Speaker 2:Anyways folks, thanks for hanging out with us today.
Speaker 1:Plant the
Speaker 2:Let's do it.
Speaker 1:Plant the bomb. Great show. Lot of fun. Always fun having Sagar and Jetty on the show. He is
Speaker 2:Really gets people riled up.
Speaker 1:He's a professional. He's just a professional. And so he shows up, sounds good, looks good, great takes, back and forth, Joe.
Speaker 2:Definitely our probably our most controversial guest judging this by the chat but we have a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah. A lot of fun. Anyway, podcast and Spotify.
Speaker 2:Have the best evening. Nice
Speaker 6:work, brothers. I'll see you on the next one.